One time, I saw a Prager U video where Dennis Prager in what’s the saddest moment ever caught on tape, makes fun of kindergarten and elementary school signs that say “The world is a better place because you are in it”. He chuckles, sneers at the phrase and then, unprompted, tells a story about how his father was an uncommunicative man, and he would have never said something like that to him. I was a new dad to my first born son. In my mind’s eye, I could picture a long chain of patriarchal violence repeated and reinforced with each generation. Men unable to give their sons anything other than tough love and hard lessons, ending in a pathetic loser sneering at children having a better world than he experienced.
To this day, I tell my sons how beautiful and kind the world has become with them here. Somehow I do hope Dennis gets a mysterious ache in his chest, every time I do. Lmao.
Generational Trauma, the only thing literally killed with kindness.
Men will really chose to fund a huge disinfo campaign to make as many people as possible as awful and unhappy as they are rather than just go to therapy. SMH.
There’s something in my eye.
They say this about wars and genocides and social issues but as soon as booba in video game shrinks 10% we need urgent action on this crisis
It’s just selfishness disguised as philosophical nihilism
The world with 100% boobas in vídeo game
🌎
The world with 90% boobas in video game
💥
voting for 90% boobas is no different than voting for 100% booba
You need to vote for 99% boobler. Do you condemn khabras?
This is the person that argues why moralism of even the secular kind is bad and we need to be unthinking nihilistic robots. These are the kind that tell me my autism makes me some hyper masculine automaton that is not suppose to know emotion.
God I’m so sick of that characterization of autism. Autism doesn’t change whether you feel emotions it just changes how you express them and how you perceive them in others. I find most people with autism (myself included) to be particularly sensitive in fact, in the way that anyone who finds themselves lower on some spectrum in the kyriarchy is.
Wandering the wretched earth with ridiculously overcomplicated thoughts about everything and disproportionate attention to fine details and out-of-place contrast while equipped with overwhelmingly powerful emotions that you process at 28.8k dialup speeds is super fun and exciting and makes me want to live
This description of autism fucks.
The guy who wrote it doesn’t due to his crippling social deficits
Last night I watched the new Amazing Digital Circus and felt that the theme can be summarized as “continuing to live despite your suffering is important because people deserve the opportunity to love you” and expressing that thought to myself has done more to quell suicidal thoughts in me than anything has in months
Wow what an insulting message, shit like this is a hop skip and a jump away from like ecco-fascism.
?Lmao in Italian this just translates to “here’s the dolphin” or “behold, the dolphin”. Both of which are so much funnier than the original
: “LGBT relationships are an AFFRONT TO DA LAWD!”:: “Climate change? Corporate greed? Like, who cares maaaaaaaaan? We’re all gonna die some day. Cantcha just learn to live and let live?”Maybe I’m missing context by not being invested in Elon Musk’s personal blog, but this seems like an overreaction to a pale blue dot meme. The word choice is a bit inelegant, but it seems to be a generic astronomy account, so I’m assuming it wasn’t chosen with secret intent to encourage mass suicide for some inexplicable reason. It’s a considerable stretch to get from “you don’t personally have planetary significance” to “you are unimportant to those around you”. I don’t expect everyone on Hexbear to necessarily be a committed Marxist, but emphasizing the importance of the collective over the individual is a pretty central aspect any vaguely “left” political ideology. Acting as though you’re earth’s main character and bullying anyone that acts otherwise is already the default behavior we’re raised with by liberal society.
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.
again, I’ll just point out that you’ve inferred an entire personal archetype and detailed political philosophy to get mad at based on an astronomy account tweeting picture of a planet with a caption that can be reduced to “consider perspective”. it’s fair to be upset when Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, or other pop-sci entertainers espouse white supremacy while hiding behind a scientific aesthetic. I don’t think it’s reasonable to extrapolate from an astronomy tweet that scientist = atheist = nihilist = hypocrite = white chauvinist = fascist. The white supremacy of those individual entertainers is reflective of and inherited from the hegemony of the liberal societies they were raised in. They’re not political or cultural thought leaders dragging the Anglophone world into colonizing West Asia out of a personal commitment to science, philosophy, or atheism.
I promise, most of the people by volume who are committed to ethnically cleansing the global south also want to throw scientists, philosophers, and atheists on the pyre, and they have a lot to say about the dangers of society “abandoning morality” and “embracing nihilism”.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to extrapolate from an astronomy tweet that scientist = atheist = nihilist = hypocrite = white chauvinist = fascist.
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.
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).
If you assume this is true about an account that (as far as I can tell) exists to post generic space pictures, you could could just as easily make this argument about any tweet. It’s on an American website, so it’s probably a white American poster and America’s fascist, so the poster must be fascist, so the post is self-reinforcing evidence of the poster’s white cryptofascism. Somebody posted about math? Bet they’re dogwhistling about the rate of profit and how it must always go up at the expense of the working class. Picture of landscape? I don’t see any people in that picture; must be an incitement to genocide. A painting? You know who else liked painting?
I think you’re misattributing your feelings about a particular subreddit to the demographics of the United States. Reddit (and X dot com) as a whole aren’t reflective of US demographics. Every US president in history has been a Christian. Fewer Americans would vote for a “well-qualified” atheist nominated by their own party for president than would vote for a Muslim across Democrats, Republicans, and independents. 70% of the US identifies as Christian, and the 20% that could be broadly be considered atheist plummets to around 3% if we’re going by strict self-identification; that’s the highest it’s ever been, and its disproportionately younger generations with less political power. On US support for the Zionist genocide on Gaza, Muslims and black Protestants are the only groups with lower support for Israel than the religiously unaffiliated. US Protestants (evangelical and mainline, and excluding black people), Catholics, and Jewish people are by far the most likely to justify Zionist violence and condemn Hamas self defense.
“You have a moral duty to bully atheist nerds for their nihilistic immorality!” (the explicit premise of this post) is an attitude that’s always been considerably more popular in mainstream American liberal society that whatever inverse you seem to imagine is happening. Add “socialist” to your list of things that are “poisoning our country” and you’ve got the makings of a generic bipartisan congressional campaign. It would take a pretty remarkable feat of mental gymnastics to attribute the US attacks on reproductive freedom and LGBTQ people to politically organized Kierkegaard fans, or suggest that the proletarian revolutions that liberated millions in the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China were driven by people embracing faith in the divine and rejecting godless materialism.
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.
Obama identifies as a Protestant Christian and regularly attended church. If you were politically active at the time, you may recall a particular controversy about his longtime pastor. Trump identifies as a nondenominational Christian, and is currently selling Bibles. Joe Brandon’s Catholicism is more bloodthirsty than say the pope or many European Catholics prefer, but it’s right in line with mainstream US Catholic attitudes. Calling the Zionist project “secular” is pretty wild claim I’m not sure you could get any credible “Israeli” to get behind. The Zionist government (and a majority Jewish people in the US) isn’t exactly shy about it’s position that Zionism is Judaism and vice versa. A German census in 1939 has 95% identifying as Protestant or Catholic, and 3.5% identifying as nondenominational Christians. The Nazi regime’s incorporation of Christianity into its political rhetoric and association of atheism with Bolshevism is extremely well documented. “Gott mit uns” wasn’t a Nazi PSA about wearing gloves in winter while fighting the godless communists. Mussolini made Roman Catholicism the state religion of Fascist Italy. I’m not particularly well read on Imperial Japan, but they did codify Shinto as the state religion. You seem to equate the big three Axis powers as a single homogeneous “fascism” (a reductive premise I’d disagree with) while claiming it arises from “pro-West secular views”, but apart from none of those being secular states, Japan wasn’t considered “Western” by any measure until after colonization by the US.
I’m going to bow out of this conversation now, because it’s hard to imagine this discussion taking a turn for the respectful or productive when most of your premises are verifiably inaccurate as a matter of historical fact.
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.
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.
I mean, sure. Art is open to interpretation and all, but I think “lol no one and nothing matters” would be an odd takeaway from pale blue dot. Do you genuinely believe that that’s the message that a generic astronomy account is intentionally trying to communicate? If so, why? I’m not aware of any global political groups with power that are motivated by an adolescent misunderstanding of nihilism.
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.
That’s very clearly the message: you don’t matter on the scale of the Earth, everyone disappears when you zoom out far enough.
Yes. I agree this is what it’s communicating. This seems straightforward, empirically correct, and philosophically basic. Things look different when you look at them from a different perspective. Isn’t it interesting to look outside ourselves for a moment and consider things from a different point of view.
the ethos of so-called effective altruism, longtermism, extropianism, etc. …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
I’m sure you can find people in real-life who believe those things, and maybe even some who will admit to knowing what the fuck those specific terms mean. I’m sure some of those people even like looking at pictures of space. I’m sure some of those people look at pictures of space and think to themselves “all that will be mine some day! I shall rise above the puny mortals and claim my rightful place among the stars! galaxies will tremble at my unrivaled splendor!”
I just don’t believe that the Venn diagram of people who like looking at space pics and people who are seriously committed to leading a post-human space empire is a circle. I know a lot of people who like looking at pictures of space and considering how small we are on a cosmic scale, and I can think of maybe a few people in real life that are making serious financial decisions about fucking the planet to colonize Mars. For that Venn diagram to be a circle, it would require most of the people I’ve ever interacted with during my life to all secretly hold the same specific and detailed political philosophy that they’ve deliberately kept hidden from me. When I find myself seriously considering things like that, I remind myself to go outside and touch grass. Or look at pictures of space.
Isn’t it interesting to look outside ourselves for a moment and consider things from a different point of view.
When I find myself seriously considering things like that, I remind myself to go outside and touch grass.Why are you talking to me like that?
I just don’t believe that the Venn diagram of people who like looking at space pics and people who are seriously committed to leading a post-human space empire is a circle.
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.
you don’t matter on the scale of the Earth, everyone disappears when you zoom out far enough.
Yes. I agree this is what it’s communicating. This seems straightforward, empirically correct, and philosophically basic.
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.
Why are you talking to me like that?
I apologize. I was going for levity, not insult. It’s easy, in niche internet subcultures like this, to fall into the idea that everyone outside the subculture all uniformly believes the same specific thing. I’m not immune. Many internet subcultures devote a lot of energy into collectively creating a hypothetical amalgamation of everything they personally dislike, then posting about how everyone else is just like the bad thing chimera. It’s the most reliable way to drive engagement. Look how popular /r/ShitDumpPeopleSay style communities are in every online medium. I find that most normal people tend to have diverse, inconsistent, and largely unexamined beliefs about most things.
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 agree in spirit with all of this. “We all matter equally” doesn’t mean “no one matters”. I don’t believe not individually “mattering” on a planetary scale means that humans don’t “matter” at all: I see it as a rejection of anthropocentrim. I’m not the most important thing in the world. It came before me. It will be here after I’m gone. It wasn’t created to service my personal desires. It’s the only home of uncountable living creatures, older and more numerous than me, and they all have value too. I am not so much more important than every other living thing on this planet that destroying our shared home is acceptable just because I got what I needed out of it. Other things live here too, and because I don’t have any more inherent value than any of them, I have a responsibility to be a good neighbor and steward of the only home any of us have.
I’m pretty far removed from taking Philosophy 101 so forgive my ignorance, but I wanted to speak on nihilism. I also haven’t read a ton of any specific nihilist philosopher’s work, so I’m going off the broad strokes as I understand them. Most people use “nihilism” in the way that most people use “anarchy”: as an epithet that broadly means chaotic, disordered, or without purpose. Nihilism, like Anarchy, means a lot of specific and conflicting things depending on which particular author you’re reading. My reductive understanding of the broad umbrella of nihilist philosophy boils down to two points. Point 1: Life has no intrinsic meaning. That’s about as far as most people get. They hear that and go, “See, that sounds bad! [insert supernatural thing here] gives life meaning and tells us the one correct way all must live!” The ignored second part as I understand it is Point 2: Because life has no intrinsic meaning, we must create our own meaning. Some people hear that second part too and decide that, on the whole, it’s not for them. They prefer to believe that something outside themselves gives their life meaning and defines how they should live. Fine by me! I’m not the philosophy police! I’ve just genuinely never heard of a self-described nihilist (outside of literal children) who claimed their own understanding of nihilism to be the first point, but not the second. The only adults I have ever seen use “nihilism” that way are using it as an epithet to explain what people they don’t like must believe in order to be so evil.
It’s the same way most people use Anarchist. “That person doesn’t care about anything, and they just want the world to burn because they’re an anarchist!” I’m a Marxist-Leninist, so have some significant disagreements with Anarchist political philosophy as I understand it. That said, I don’t believe any self-described anarchists would characterize their belief system as “basically just, like, the Joker, man”, even if that’s what most people probably think. When someone says “the problem with society is there’s all these anarchists that don’t care about anything and just wanna fuck shit up”, I don’t think that’s a very accurate way to explain the world, both because there aren’t that many Anarchists shaping world politics, and the ones that exist wouldn’t describe their own beliefs as “fuck everything! nothing matters!”
Coming back to nihilism, I think plenty of people can find the idea that life has no intrinsic meaning beyond what we make for ourselves to be freeing. They can know being their authentic self and doing what makes them happy is just as valid as anything else, and that they’re not “failing” at life by not conforming to the mold that their family, or god, or society sets for them. A woman isn’t “failing” at her “intrinsic purpose” as a wife and mother if she doesn’t want to do any of that shit, for example. Any way she chooses to live is an equally valid way of being a woman. I can see why that might not resonate with some people, or that some might be frightened rather than hopeful at the idea of defining your own purpose, and I think that’s fine. A philosophy is only useful if it helps you navigate your own life. People have different perspectives, and I generally think we should try to understand one another’s differences rather than imposing our own on others.
joke: please do not yell at me
…except when it comes to the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism, the one true path to proletarian liberation! All revisionists get the wall!
tl;dr Nihilism: it’s about perspective
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.
It really is a matter of scale. Even at the scale of society as a whole, you as an individual don’t “matter” in that your presence (or lack of it) isn’t going to impact its course or functionality. It’s literally why we have to organize in order to even have any hope of achieving our aims. We certainly don’t “matter” on a global scale. However, what the person in the OP image said is entirely true. At the scale of our families and social group, and absolutely at the scale of our individual experience, each of us matters profoundly. At the scale of our individual experience, each of us is a universe unto ourselves.
It is infuriating to me when people refuse to understand that what is true at one scale may not be (and usually isn’t) true at another scale, but that this does not invalidate how true things are at any other given scale. The fact that your impact on the galaxy as a whole is so small as to be effectively insignificant does not mean that your impact on the world you live in, literally your sphere of experience and influence, is insignificant, because the truth is that it is extremely significant at that scale.
Western culture and society is pathological in how it simultaneously acts as though the only reality is what exists at the scale of the individual when it comes to blame and “rEsPoNsIbiLitY” but will utterly diminish and demean the experience of any individual that doesn’t spend their existence on this earth in service of the great evil god of capital. It’s Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and families.” Meanwhile every single one of those individual men and women (rather the ones who don’t own or control capital) are treated as nothing more than a cog in a machine, a sliver of utility to be used as such then expended and replaced as such. It’s a philosophy that cherry-picks only the convenient truths of how things work at various different given scales and applies them across the board as if they’re true at all other scales, all of course to serve the interests of the ruling class. It is a source of many of the philosophical contradictions of capitalism and the diseased society that results from it.
Dialectics - transformation of quantity into quality
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I think this happens with so-called “rationalists” too, in the opposite direction. They zoom out the scope of time and reality so they can say stuff like “we need to sell our cat’s organs and donate to MRI for the infinite simulated orphans in the future” despite the fact that’s insane and absurd to anyone who lives in the like, present, earth-oriented scope
In this example they replace God in their minds with an arbitrary moral system that happens to justify worshipping billionaires
Agree. Nihilism is often the baby steps of philosophy. Yes morality is constructed and socially useful, that’s why we need it duh. The absurdity of the “capitalist individualism vs communist collectivism” is that for your own selfish happiness you need to be loved and cared about and helped and supported by a greater structure. But I guess it’s a lot easier to feel good about being edgy than accepting that the world needs to move forward
What you are referencing is usually called a ‘framing problem’ or ‘reference issue’, usually the latter. I’ve never heard of it called a ‘scope problem’, but that probably works as well.
Yes. This. This is exactly what I was talking about in my other comment in this thread, posted before seeing this one. I was calling it scale instead of scope, but this is spot on.
People will pick and choose how things function at one scope and pretend it applies at others. A lot of people, even good well-meaning ones, will do this and fall into this trap, but particularly shitty people will do this as a way to justify their garbage beliefs or justify hurting and demeaning others. Exactly like OP image “you don’t matter 'cause the Earth doesn’t give a shit if you’re here or not as one person. You’re a loser for thinking you matter at all.” FUCK that. You absolutely matter, just not necessarily at the scale/scope of an entire planet orbiting a star, that doesn’t invalidate or make meaningless the just as real scale/scope at which you DO matter. Their application of how things function at scale is always used in whatever way is beneficial to them at the moment or to prove whatever flawed, even sadistic point they’re trying to make. Capitalists, politicians, and of course the mass media under their control do this constantly and it infuriates me to no end.
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One of the most existentially calming things is learning just how subjective fame is.
As long as I got my friends and family, I won’t lose sleep about not being a celebrity. Would a little bit of recognition be cool? Absolutely, but I don’t think I can handle being under public scrutiny 24/7.
I actually think both Twitter posts could serve to reduce suicidal ideation depending on the individual.
I like feeling small when I feel like I have big problems. The ocean and/or the stars are good for me at those times.
The world exists because I perceive it. You’re welcome!
