Greentext

Spitting fire!

There is a quote from Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits that I think of every time this comes up.

“You can lie to yourself, say that you never had a choice, that you weren’t cut out for this. But deep down you’ll know. You’ll know that humans aren’t cut out for anything. We cut ourselves out. Slowly, with a rusty knife. Because otherwise, here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to die and you’re going to stand at the gates of judgment and you’re going to ask God what was the meaning of it all, and God will say, ‘I created the universe, you little shit. It was up to you to give it meaning.’”

“You really think God uses that kind of language?”

“Yes.”

Yet here we are, celebrating people whose moral purpose is nonexistent at best and usually completely evil.

my take on life is that yeah it doesn’t have inherent meaning, but you don’t need a meaning for everything you do. you can just enjoy being alive despite the meaninglessness, it actually gives you a lot of freedom to do whatever you want to do for the sake of it.

for the morals: just don’t bring in needless suffering, nobody choose to be here and nobody wants to suffer, the only thing we can do is to make the existing lives better

Yeah and Kierkegaard already solved this decades before him, in exactly the way you describe (although he didn't personally think it was possible).

You just do, Freddy.

A lot of people don't.

There's a whole superstructure to religion - culture, ethics, public infrastructure, social networks, financial networks, a common history and language - that you need to supplement as you dispose of the older system.

What the European socialists discovered at the turn of the 20th century was that you can't just burn down all the churches and start over from scratch. Anarchism without some new common social foundation just ends in civil war and foreign occupation.

Subsequent generations still need a scaffolding to cling to as they mature. And if that scaffold isn't rooted in some new existential or moral foundation (or if it's rooted in a rotten one) you end up with ultra-nationalism, or Victorian mysticism, or whatever paint Ayn Rand was huffing.

Fuck yeah I am. I've got a living playlist of lectures I can add this into, thank you!

Actually I see a yt video at the top of the page here, can I watch all the episodes there as an option?

"Must be exhausting!"

Lol what even is this?

I don't think nihilism and pragmatism are mutually exclusive