You Know What's Fucking Awesome?

I think we've all pretty well established that I don't have an excess of positive feelings concerning the world we live in and the people inhabiting it. That said, its no way to live and its not completely accurate. To demonstrate this I've decided to write a semi-regular installment here called unsurprisingly, "You Know What's Fucking Awesome" (or for the acronymically inclined YKWFA). Naturally, these posts will include things I think are genuinely interesting and have significant positive potential. It should be pretty fucking awesome.

Today's point of interest is nihilism. Now, I know that word has some stank to it thanks to a fucked up pop perception and an unfortunate internal schism. We're going to keep this as basic as possible, I'm not looking into some of the more philosophical expressions as these are typically better left to those with an excess of free time and a willing disregard for meaningful discourse (fuck Descartes). For the philosophically minded among you I'm ignoring; metaphysical nihilism, mereological nihilism, and partial nihilism. I'm giving these ones a pass because they are stupid, meaningless, and stupidly meaningless respectively and I will straight up word fight you if you don't understand that. Our big targets today are going to be existential and moral nihilism and they are awesome.

Existential nihilism is essentially that there is no inherent meaning in existence. It tends to come across as emo bullshit, but I would argue that meaninglessness is amazing. A lack of inherent value given anything that even remotely constitutes consciousness equates to an incredible degree of freedom. Sure, you're still essentially bound by the laws of physics, but other than that the sky is the limit. You want the central value of your existence to be how many sweet-ass buildings you've jumped off of? Fuck yeah, good for you. Like the idea of your life being centered on jacking off into a flowerbed? That's fucking weird, have fun. Now, admittedly, you can take this the other direction; devastated over the lack of intrinsic determinism of your existence. But really, if that's how you interact with that train of thought you're kind of a shortsighted asshole. The idea that existence is only worth it if there is some kind of fundamental importance built in that we have to discover is insulting to the scope and glory of the universe we live in.

Moral nihilism is similarly the idea that morality isn't intrinsic. I'm not going to hit this one too hard because Brian just got done going over what is basically the same argument, but if there isn't intrinsic morality, there can't be absolute morality. Intrinsic morality would mean there was an action that absolutely no one would think just, deserved, or enjoyable under any circumstance. Since the variability in personality and inevitability of psychological abnormality in a large enough population size makes this impossible we can pretty much say fuck moral absolutism.

Alright, now the kinda tricky part. The easy and obvious retort to this is also one we've poked at before. "Oh, so since it doesn't matter in a universal sense I could totally just like go out raping everyone I meet". Yes, you theoretically could, but that would make you a fucking monster and, this bit is super important, other people would fucking end you, because that's what we do to monsters. See, morality isn't an intrinsic thing. Ethics isn't intrinsic either, but there are consequences for actions. In a society, the group determines these consequences, hopefully, in an effort to encourage maximum freedom while maintaining the greatest degree of permanence in the society. The problem arises when we start exercising consequences (punishing people for) actions that aren't hurting anybody, but that's an ongoing rant that we can get to later.  So yeah, Nihilism is pretty fucking awesome.

~Eshi