The Definition of Nihilism, a Political Philosophy.

so contrasting atheism and nihilism we
have to emphasize again ithi ISM alone does not reject communism atheism alone does not reject for example the belief that you could meet and speak to the ghost of your deceased grandfather atheism alone does not reject Transcendental Meditation reincarnation or junk science claims about health and diet such as the wonder-percent meat diet so atheism is a very specific and narrow rejection of one type of belief it's easiest to imagine with a foreign repressive far away culture or like Saudi Arabia that living in a state of rebellion against the ideologue underpinnings of your society living in a state where you refuse to believe in the justifications for your society not just religious but underpinning the economic system so on and so forth that that could be a really positive liberating motivating thing in your life where you feel driven to do something better than play out the role you were born into who you know you feel motivated to rise above the conventions of the society or in to move beyond the constraints of the beliefs that define the culture that to you is most familiar as I say maybe you would move beyond the constraints of any culture or every culture the misconceptions about nihilism are strangely parallel to a pious Christians misconceptions about atheism and yet hilariously the people who are most staunch in their critique of nihilism are themselves most often atheists offer is not a nihilist because he rejects the epistemological axioms of society no he's a nihilist because society has rejected him there's a profound and unexamined assumption that anyone who becomes an iOS anyone who espouses nihilism is someone so unfortunate that they're offering a sort of terrifying last gasp with desperation before giving up on life that nihilism is part of a downward spiral of self pitying behavior but people who have no other choice no other way to get a or I don't know no other way to rekindle their optimism about their own lives or what the society they're living in imagine how laughable that same opinion is when it comes from a pious Christian or a pious Muslim in their attitude towards atheists when they say to you and they do that oh it's just poor unfortunate unlucky people people who are poverty-stricken people who had a tough life they end up turning to atheism because they can no longer believe that you know God has been generous enough to them whereas people who've had a lucky enjoyable happy optimistic sort of life those people feel gratitude for all the good things God is supposedly done for them and they remain where they just hurt me there they remain religious conformist favors of society I try to combine them into one word their religious conformist members of society it's very clear why a pious Christian a pious Muslim would have that view but it sounds to us like the most unsophisticated bumpkin nonsense we haven't quite gotten over the snobbery of pious atheists looking down their noses at nihilism in much the same way now is this partly a misunderstanding about what nihilism is what it means yeah but it doesn't take much of a thought experiment to put yourself in a position where you could recognize nihilism being an uplifting positive motivating factor of a person's life or it could be something joyous could be something that sparks the sort of sense of rebellion in them a rebellion against a society they despise a rebellion against a social role they've been born into where they say no I'm not gonna believe in any of the things underpinning the status quo in the society I'm not going to be a conformist I'm not going to play this role I'm not merely going to reject the belief in the God that this society respects I'm going to reject the belief in the economic system the social system the hierarchy the mode of political organization I don't believe in any of it anymore so someone who is an atheist in Saudi Arabia loses faith in God but by definition in God only wouldn't you regard it as a tremendously powerful thing if someone in Saudi Arabia instead got interested in nihilism they stopped believing in God they also stopped believing in the monarchy they stopped believing in aristocracy they stopped believing in all of the excuses and glorifications in propaganda that makes their country's social order seem to make sense to its members or its participants wouldn't you regard nihilism as something liberating and positive for someone raised as a true believing communist for example right now in communist China but then at one point they challenged the beliefs their parents have given him they challenged the assumptions they were born into they stopped believing not in God because communism is an atheist system they stopped believing in the underpinnings of that worldview of that social system of that history and of the excuses for particular massacres the rationalizations and so on and so forth it's very significant that still to this day the Communist Party of China describes its enemies as historical nihilists that's a tradition that dates back to you know 1917 in Russia in Russia the nihilists were a formally organized political party of some historical significance and they were ultimately hunted down and killed by the communists who's very sad in any case the Russian nihilists are one very interesting you know flashpoint in the history of nihilism to be examined but the idea that communism defines itself in terms of a set of beliefs that must struggle against nihilism that has endured long beyond 1917 in Russia and it still goes on today in China in order to be a good member of Chinese society you must believe in history you must believe in the propaganda about history presented by the Communist Party and the people who reject that teaching the people who do not believe they're the enemies of the party who are called historical nihilus I consider myself an historical nihilist I grew up with two parents who were both true believing communists and I had to reject I had to outgrow the religion of my family and that involved a rejection of communism not rejecting a faith in God but rejecting faith in many other things including rejecting a faith in different economic abstractions different beliefs about economics that help to define the communist worldview so coming to the definition of nihilism as rapidly as possible we can do it through a contrast of atheism versus nihilism here's slide one atheism can be approximately summed up with the phrase quote I do not believe in God close quote but more precisely this means there is nothing to be believed in in this category of things called god or gods etc now why is that clarification meaningful or useful we'll make the comparison to someone who refuses to use fluoride toothpaste because they find the scientific argument for its advantages unconvincing they could be accurately described as stating quote I do not believe in fluoride right so their position is not that there was no such thing as fluoride to be believed in they just specifically do not believe in the scientific rationale for using fluoride and yeah as the photographs show here on screen there are significant numbers of people who have that belief or have that lack of belief so contrasting atheism and nihilism we have to emphasize again ithi ISM alone does not reject communism atheism alone does not reject for example the belief that you could meet and speak to the ghost of your deceased grandfather atheism alone does not reject Transcendental Meditation reincarnation or junk science claims about health and diet such as the 1% meat diet so atheism is a very specific and narrow rejection of one type of belief so whereas the atheists say there are no God's to be believed in nihilists say there is nothing to be believed and we can narrow down this category of nothing just a little bit there is not anything in the category of things that this society presents as ought to be believed in or perhaps there's nothing in the category that any society could ever present as ought to be believed in I wouldn't believe in any of it by way of illustration here it's easy to tell yourself if I had lived in Nazi Germany I wouldn't have believed in any of that stuff although the quality of the scientific and political arguments presented by Adolf Hitler were abysmally poor the human tendency to believe whatever society presents as ought to be believed in is very powerful even with reference to extremely poor work of literature like Hitler's Mein Kampf or most of the major religions textbooks think about living in communist China right now think about living in post genocide Canada right now I think it is true that nihilism entails that you live in a sort of state of constant rebellion or constant friction with the society that you're living in however the extent of that rebellion the nature of that rebellion is going to be very different in different social contexts it's not going to be the same in Canada in 2019 as it would be in Saudi Arabia Communist China Hong Kong and it's not gonna be the same in these social conditions as it would have been in Russia back in 1917 we're really you know rebellion against the bolsheviks of any kind was immediately risking your life it was immediately a life or death struggle with ideological extremists however it's really false to presume that this state of rebellion is a negative self pitying resignation to your life being miserable and terrible and bad poor little me it's not like that it's not like that for most of us it's not like that for most of us who come on the internet and talk about nihilism and by the way I get fan mail from people for whom nihilism has been a really positive motivating force in their lives I get fan mail from people who discovered nihilism from my YouTube channel and then went off and read a bunch of books and then send me email telling me what a positive thing nihilism has been in their lives so again it's easiest to imagine with a foreign repressive far away culture or like Saudi Arabia that living in a state of rebellion against the ideological underpinnings of your society living in a state where you refuse to believe in the justifications for your society not just religious but underpinning the economic system so on and so forth that that could be a really positive liberating motivating thing in your life where you feel driven to do something better then play out the role you were born into if you know you feel motivated to rise above the conventions of the society or in to move beyond the constraints of the beliefs that define the culture that to you is most familiar as I say maybe you would move beyond the constraints of any culture or every culture I don't know maybe if you took someone out of Saudi Arabia and they went to live in Switzerland they would find conditions in Switzerland good enough they wouldn't feel that same tension but the tension could be productive and inspirational so to give one example from my own life said this many times for me living in Canada really is morally tantamount to living in a hypothetical Germany where the Nazis won the war all right Canada is built on genocide all right and I refuse to accept that I don't believe in any of the excuses or rationales I don't believe any of the justifications for that genocide no how did I cope with that tension well I didn't choose to move to a cave in the countryside and isolate myself from society I respond to in a somewhat productive somewhat creative way by trying to learn creative way at one point I was actually enrolled in a university getting a university degree in Korean enjoy as languages and I saw a future for myself in Canada where I was working in language education and research and revitalization efforts to try to prevent those languages from going extinct so that was ultimately a kind of productive meaningful response at however I did that believing in nothing and I did it precisely because I reject the belief system of the British Empire even the belief system my own parents subscribed to the kind of air SATs belief system the whole society is based on where they ultimately have to believe in their own goodness the goodness of their society their home their whole lives notwithstanding the fact that it's built on genocide and that genocide is still continuing and they're still participating in it and they're not doing anything about it are complaining against it so based on that rejection of beliefs on a really kind of nihilistic basis I threw myself into learning Korean ageia play with a passion and I saw a career path where I could do something it's kind of humanitarian and meaningful reacting against a rebellion against the society it was I was living in that's a completely different set of motivations than someone who for example someone who believes in the ghosts of their ancestors actually existing someone who uses hallucinogenic drugs at a powwow in a tent has visions and then decides on that basis decides on the basis of a pious adherence to the religion of their ancestors on the basis of a spiritual experience who decides on that basis to go to a university and enroll in courses studying creating a cheap way so as you can imagine when I was a student of these languages I would have contact with people who had very different belief systems very different motivations obviously can also mean people who are communists or far left wingers and want to get involved with indigenous peoples politics for those kinds of reasons so this is my point it's false well for one thing people are using a false definition of nihilism period for another thing they're using that false definition because of the prejudicial assumption that nihilism is something sad and self-pitying it's a desperate gasp for attention it's a it's a plea from people have been unfortunate in life who've been excluded from a society they want to believe in they want to participate in they've had their belief in the good things of the society broken shattered and if only they could be read their head could they have only they could have their optimism rekindled to be brought back into this belief system that puts atheists in precisely the same position as true believing Catholics and true believing Muslims when they say the same thing about atheists when they say all these poor a theists they've been unfortunate they've had their hearts broken they've been unlucky in life if only we could rekindle the optimism the gratitude the faith to bring them back into conforming with our religious worldview our religious Society offer is not a nihilist because he rejects the epistemological axioms of society no he's a nihilist because society has rejected him nihilism is indeed a worldview that rejects all of the beliefs underpinning the current social status quo in whatever society you happen to believe it it's a challenge to ourselves it requires a lot of strength to really live as a nihilist because I think there is this human tendency that we see playing out tragically in communist societies and fascist societies in religious oligarchy and so on there is this tendency to want to cling to whatever the social group around you presents as virtuous whatever it is they say ought to be believed in it's a tremendously powerful kind of heard instinct we have and nihilists they don't just narrowly reject the belief in theology the belief in a god or gods they reject all of it [Music]