this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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Chapotraphouse
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The context is that the people who tend to espouse this line of reasoning tend to be new atheist types who do have extremely emotional and moralizing arguments they make all the time in other spheres of life. They’re hypocrites who selectively employ this type of philosophical nihilism (nihilism isn’t “you should commit suicide btw, it’s “nothing matters or has inherent meaning”) when it suits them and ignore it when it doesn’t.
This type of person is very well known and hated on hexbear, the new atheist “secular” chauvinist who also happens to hate Islam and always talks in a clash of civilizations idealist manner. For some reason nothing matters we are just apes on a rock man, but also those brown apes over there have an evil culture. Sam Harris, Hitchens, Musk, Dawkins, Maher, you know the type.
It's already starting half-way down that line of inference, at nihilist and hypocrite. Considering it's a western white nihilist account it's not that large of a leap to white chauvinist (that's the majority of the West).
I think you're in a bit of denial about how evil and widespread these atheist neocon Liberals are and that they want to ethnically cleanse the global south even more than the local chuds. Most Zionists in the west are not evangelical crazies, they're "logical secular Liberal centrists". Fascism arises from the warmonger capitalists, not the fringe lunatics. You don't understand the core of imperialism or fascism if you don't think these types are extremely dangerous and our primary enemy.
The Nazis and Italian Fascists and Japanese Imperialists were not religious zealots. They all espoused scientism and secular theories of racial/cultural conflict. It is not Joe Brandon's catholicism that is driving his Zionist bloodlust and islamophobia, as he's much more extreme than the vast majority of catholics and catholic leadership on these matters. He is a zionist because of the secular Israeli project's influence in the political system and his hollow sell-out nature making him a vessel to be filled with the first monied interest to cross his path. He is a secular fascist, despite being a catholic. Obama was a secular fascist. Trump was a secular fascist. Nixon was a secular fascist. Are you noticing a pattern? It's nothing to do with their christianity, it's their "pro-west" secular views that fascism emerges from.
I'm actually extremely mad that nihilists are using the pale blue dot this way.
What I always took away from it is we're all the same. The pale blue dot is us, not just humans, but the whole biosphere is all an interconnected "us" that unites Earth as the only world to harbor life in a huge and lonely universe. There is nowhere else.
Or as Sagan said: "To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." That shit makes me tear up, still, 16 years out of highschool when I first heard it.
To flip this around as "lol no one and nothing matters" is an abomination, a total perversion of the pale blue dot.
These people are not well.
That's very clearly the message: you don't matter on the scale of the Earth, everyone disappears when you zoom out far enough.
And that's exactly the ethos of so-called effective altruism, longtermism, extropianism, etc. The idea is that you should zoom out and ignore all the individual people because they don't matter on a large scale, instead we should focus on growing the economy for a technological-utopian future where the number of humans can grow exponentially by living in space and trying to colonize all parts of the universe.
This dominates Silicon Valley and has become a driving force in the tech industry.
Why are you talking to me like that?
This isn't just a space pic. This is, specifically, a nihilist space meme. I think the venn diagram in this case has a lot of overlap.
I reject that!
Everyone matters. When you zoom out, we're all the same. We're all connected. An injury to one is an injury to all.
What this meme does and what you are doing is flipping that around to then say "When you zoom out, we're all irrelevant. We're all nothing. No one matters at scale." I refuse! Every single person matters to all of us, because we're all the same. When you zoom out you can't tell us apart, all you can see is a pale blue dot. That's us. That doesn't mean that no one matters at scale, that means everyone matters as much as everyone else. No one is more important or more valuable or more human, we are all the same, we all matter equally. We are our home.
I refuse to accept that no one matters, no matter what scale we are talking about. Every single person matters as part of that pale blue dot.
It sure has been a long time since Philosophy 101 huh? I'm pretty sure you are confusing existentialism with existential nihilism.
Existentialism is the belief that we construct the meaning of our lives through our own awareness, will, and reason. Nihilism, on the other hand, is the assertion that there is no meaning to life including whatever meaning we try to make for ourselves and that it is pointless to try to give life meaning. The man climbs the tree because he wants to, there's no deeper meaning behind it because meaning doesn't exist. He's not making a new meaning for himself, he's just doing what he wants because there's no reason not to and nothing is stopping him.
I'm sympathetic to the nihilist view, but rather than reject giving life meaning as pointless I just recognize that it is absurd and then do it anyway.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy, yeah?
And now we return to that pale blue dot. That's home. That's us. I choose to give that meaning and acknowledge that I am choosing to do so, despite the meaningless universe in which we find ourselves. I am part of something bigger than myself, and so are you, and together we give the world meaning. Nihilism rejects meaning, and I don't think you're actually a nihilist.
You're right, “only I matter” and “only I and [subgroup] matter” are not nihilistic either, but that's that's not what this meme is implying or what I'm rejecting. A truly nihilistic stance is "I don't matter, no one matters, nothing matters, and there's no reason to create meaning because that doesn't matter either." If I ask "should I kill myself" then nihilism can not provide me a reason to survive. Earth before, Earth after, nothing changes. That's why Camus considered suicide to be the only really serious philosophical problem.
Now of course, nihilists aren't necessarily suicidal (although it's not uncommon). The nihilist philosophy tells us to reject meaning and to pursue personal pleasure and satisfaction and self actualization i.e. the Will to Power, not because that is the meaning of life, but because in a meaningless universe there's no reason to do anything else. The person who can achieve this becomes the Übermensch, able to overcome the limits of religion and reason to pursue ambition and no longer burdened by the sorrows of ordinary people.
And again, this isn't something that gives life meaning. It's a supposedly rational solution to the question "should I kill myself" i.e. the Übermensch wants to live for life itself and does not need a reason to do so or to find meaning for life to be worth living.
All of this is to say that, yes, real people believe this stuff and they should be discouraged from doing so whenever possible.