Nihilism: the Only Philosophy You Can Really Live By.

what is nihilism it's the conclusion you
arrive at that there is nothing to be believed in it's a critique of belief that concludes not just with the rejection of one belief or any particular set of beliefs but of all beliefs it's a critique even of you can say the the psychology of believing in general very typically someone might be raised in the catholic church they're taught believe believe believe they're taught that faith and believing are you know really important virtuous things and then as they get older they may be engaged in a critique of what it is they believe right now one conclusion you could come to would be to reject catholicism and embrace protestantism i've actually met people who did that you know where they they lose their faith in this particular church this particular doctrine or creed but they adopt another church another doctrine another crate however even if you're talking about someone who rejects the belief in jesus the belief in god or particular principles there's quite a separate question of having a critique of belief as such where you come you come to the conclusion it's not just having faith in these particular things that was erroneous or wrong i have now come to appreciate that faith itself is bad faith itself is a problem faith itself is to be rejected what i used to think of as a virtue in believing i now see as a as a vice as an encumbrance [Music] so you know in proposing the definition of historical nihilism this is really a perfect um forms of perfect symmetry with chinese communism what the chinese communist party teaches today as it's as its creed is that you must believe in history that you must believe in historical inevitability that you must believe that the mistakes that were made in the past were all for the best because they're part of this logical necessary inevitable uh progress of history that they're they're teaching people to memorize of passing through stages of development something like you know evolution so the fact that tens of millions of people starve to death because of an error you know that's somehow too terrible for us to accept emotionally so that instead we construe this new religion where we want to believe that wasn't just an error that wasn't just a mistake was for the greater good and that the the good things we have now are some of our product of that mistake so something white people might be able to uh relate to more more easily you know what if you had one group of people in your society who said look the whole experience of slavery of enslaving specifically enslaving black africans and bringing them to the new world this is just an error this is just a mistake you know this is just terrible and everyone would be better off today if we hadn't done it you know people in africa would be better as well as people in the united states and europe and so on this was just wrong and then you have another group of people who are saying no no you can't believe that you can't accept that you must believe you must believe that this was for the greater good that this was the right thing to do at the time because it made sense so this type of rationalization it's not just chinese communists who do it although chinese communism is an extreme example well the the series of negations that i'm interested in that you know mattered to me personally and that i basically preach to others they have to do with in this sense rejecting what people think is meaningful in history what people believe in in history and i'm saying no it's it's precisely not believing in those things that matters it's precisely having detachment about those things and um you know this is the simplest way to describe it is say look atheism is just taking one step atheism is just rejecting a belief in god right what nihilism is interesting is taking a much greater second step it's not just god it's belief itself that we're rejecting i have a bunch of fault this is interesting a bunch of follow-up questions it's just is this just kind of an awareness that things like history are unreliable like is that is that part of it that if we just you know go with what's accepted as some piece of history you you're kind of you know deluding yourself potentially knowing how unreliable history is is that connected to what you're talking about i think reliability is is is kind of irrelevant uh because we're not talking about the ability to know what happened but we're talking about the way in which people believe in things and then assign meanings to them in their life on the basis of that belief right um now trisha paytas you know uh has recently had a scandal on youtube because she admitted she had never heard of the holocaust she didn't even know that she did nothing about this i think you might have heard this part of the h3h3 descent into madness so you know okay this is just something you don't know now that's one kind of problem which is just ignorance right now there are other people who fasten on to and believe in the events of the holocaust to justify one ideology or another now the ugliest and most extreme of course would be people like neo-nazis who take in one direction there are i've i've had muslim friends i have one ex-muslim friend now a guy was raised muslim there are certainly a lot of people who are part of the mainstream religion of islam from that history and anti-semitism as a whole other bunch of meanings but like on a really simple level if you know someone who believes and this is quite common oh the germans did this terrible thing to us therefore it's okay for us to commit these atrocities against palestinians now you know if you were actually justifying doing terrible things to germans there's already a problem here right but you know these people in palestine had nothing to do with the nazis they didn't you know they weren't working for adolf hitler or something in this way people really do assign meanings to history and they believe in them and they find justifications for the lives they're living now they're fine justifications for committing atrocities doing terrible things now they also find justifications for just leading you know frankly mediocre lives now you know for for whatever it is they're doing with their life in general people become beholden to fixed ideas in history and some of these ideas you know we um we learned them in early childhood and they may they may be very difficult for us to wiggle our way out of certainly you know nationalism uh gives us a great many examples in this in the same way but the problem there so just to answer your question again directly the problem there isn't that the actual facts are unknowable right it's not the uncertainty of knowing what happened in history it's what oh it's what you're doing with that knowledge afterward it's believing in it that's the problem so what is what is yours because you clearly read a lot of history and stuff what is your so how do you get around that exactly or what's your what's your solution to this to this this issue with with history wow it's an issue with history and how it's interpreted it sounds like yeah yeah and it's an issue with history and and what it uh you know what it means in your life um okay so you know i spent about 10 years uh studying buddhism i'm just trying to give you an example it's easy to understand all right why was i the only scholar working on buddhism willing to talk about slavery he buddhism also as an historical tradition as a cult and as a religion it was involved with slave trading all right uh in the area i was in in northern thailand and laos they bought and sold slaves at the buddhist temple it's not remote the buddhist temples owned slaves okay there were there were slaves who were the property of the buddhist temple all right and and even the language of ancient buddhist scripture it's full of the word slave again and again again the word slaves in there all the time okay i think i had a kind of flexibility of mind a kind of openness to responding to the facts and asking questions about them that true believers didn't have right now i met i knew other scholars of buddhism i knew really just put us and you know they'd say things very similar to what muslims will say in making excuses for slavery in their religion like oh no no but but you have to understand that's justified for this reason like that was good and necessary and inevitable you can't let yourself think that was bad you can't let yourself question that you know no i let myself think the unthinkable i let myself question the unquestionable all the time so in tearing apart history i'm finding new meanings that other people won't find um precisely because i depart from this position of radical skepticism of regarding everyone else's beliefs and assumptions as meaningless french people don't want to ask the question of what napoleon really did in relation to slavery especially in the island of haiti oh no no napoleon was a great hero he saved the revolution he stood up for the principles of the equality of man did he did napoleon stand up for the principles of the equality of man of black men did he and people will live their whole lives they may even read huge books like this about napoleon and they can never question it and they can they can never think it through um i sorry a really really short example but this one you know stays with me emotionally there's a major monument in bangkok thailand that they just called the victory monument and i asked many learned people all these people were university graduates they all spoke english at that time i couldn't speak thai i could i could ask where the bathroom wasn't i spoke very little and i asked them and you see this monument almost every day it's like it's right in the middle it's at a major intersection in bangkok but anyway you at least see it every week living in bangkok and it's this big monument and shown on the news it's a big iconic moment ask them what was the victory that monument was made to come out and of course the first thing that's interesting is none of them knew and many of them had literally worshipped this monument it's not worth describing but they they do these different things of bowing and placing flowers and stuff and i'm not i'm not trying to insult them for that but you're worshiping a monument and you don't even know what the historical event was and i think two or three of the people that kind of scratched it hasn't thought of it like um um i guess i guess it must be world war ii and then i asked did thailand win in world war ii they didn't they lost they lost twice um you know i'm not gonna do it now i actually do know what that what that monument is is a monument to people live with legends about national greatness personal greatness ethnic identity the meaning of life they're not quite as powerful as religious delusions like i wouldn't say they shape people's lives to the same extent that belief in islam or christianity or mormonism does but you know in this way your life becomes infested with and delimited by um your beliefs to a remarkable extent it limits the questions you can ask it when it limits what you can learn uh what you're capable of accomplishing creatively in my opinion so it's so that going back to the nihilism definition is it it's something to the effect of you know avoiding beliefs so that you don't your your thinking isn't rigid you're not stuck to things that you know are not necessarily reliable it's just kind of you still i mean you still have like let's say soft beliefs you know things that you are pretty sure of but you still leave room for but how far do you take that like do you believe in like an objective reality is is it just is it is it a lack of trust in information or is it a lack of trust what what is where do you think it's like i want to hear more about this nihilism right but tell me more about like that so you're you're thinking more of of uh skepticism or cynicism because that's about knowledge and what can be known right and what i'm talking about is a critique of belief not not of knowledge so i'm not interested in all in the question of does two plus two equal four um so if you ask the question uh is objective reality real and knowable because that's always the tough part it's not whether or not things are objectively real but can you know that they're do you really know what color this shirt is as if you have experience with youtube and live stream very often you put on a shirt that's red and it looks pink you know they just say maybe a shallow example but still you know this question of are things knowable um this this is from my perspective quite quite separate belief to what extent is objective reality real and knowable when people play baseball right you have to draw lines on the field and the lines in the field have to be visible to all parties so you know when you hit the ball if it is fair or foul so you know where first base is and you know where second place is can you imagine playing baseball without drawing any lines on the field like where every player just has to use their imagination for where first base is oh did you make it to first base or or not you know some other sports you'll say it's about football or something oh was that a touchdown or not i don't know he says in his subjective opinion it was this isn't this isn't the reality we live in we live in a reality where most of the distinctions we rely on are self-evident to everyone what's disputed is what what they mean in what sense they matter now so with history it's not so much what we take from the past it's the use we make of it in the present the facts of the holocaust can be established quite simply do they justify the current existence of the state of israel as a theocracy by the way not as a democracy what does that really have to do with the relationship between islam and and jews in the middle east like which has another history going back you know more than a thousand years and so on okay you know but to them because they believe in these things that's that's as self-evident as third base they see that those lines that they've drawn they live within those lines they dream in them they think in them and so beliefs come to form their expectations of the reality the way they perceive reality the way they live their lives yeah so that's i just say it's a critique of of the steps we take after uh merely knowing um simple facts and look so we're both canadian you know to my to my knowledge um you know it's one thing to be aware that canada is a country built on genocide and it's another thing to manufacture a nationalist myth or a british empire myth that justifies that as something necessary and good and meaningful and positive to believe that was for the greater good that uh the native languages should go extinct the native people should be driven off their land and so on right there's a step there which doesn't it doesn't directly rely on the mere knowledge of facts for me you know nihilism is a tremendously liberating creative positive philosophy to live with but it also puts all the responsibility on you because i don't care that your grandparents were catholic or your grandparents were jewish or your grandparents were mohawk first nations people right it's all it's all on you it's your blank canvas it's your life and then it's it's your responsibility and you can squander it you can just play video games you can do nothing right or you can just try to mindlessly imitate what your grandparents did before believe the same things they believe walk in their footsteps you can right but then there's this radically different possibility um of something better of something worse of something new of something unknown but something that's yours right your painting your sculpture your knowledge your wisdom your ignorance your life and that's the sense in which nihilism is going to beat every other philosophy every other religion every time because no other philosophy is really yours [Music]