Apparently I have 13 followers! That is quite a few. Even if one of them is the devil, that's pleasing. Also, apparently one of my brother's friends is an avid reader of this. Hello, Madam! How are you finding it thus far? It isn't always amazing, I know - but one does one's best.
I am going to spout a hell of a lot of gibberish into this blog post. Don't take it seriously.
I was in the shower recently humming to myself and thinking about nihilists and how much they annoy me. That's an oversimplification, but by and large the philosophy is one that has always infuriated me - and that is because it hinges on a willful decision to be a pessimist and one that isn't based on fact or logic. They decide to be uncaring about the world and then try and back this up with 'logic'. It bites them in the ass, and here is why:
If nothing is everything, than anything is something.
Do you like that? I came up with it myself. I thought it was clever, anyway. I even Googled it and it didn't come up with any hits, so I may be the first to write something like that.
Anyway, moving on from my insufferable smugness, I'll explain. If we accept the nihilistic argument - that ultimately all things are pointless and that there is no action that anyone can take that has a purpose - you are faced with an interesting choice. If everything is pointless, you can do what most nihilists do, which is slip into a veritable coma of apathy and bemoan your fate, bitching about how nothing serves any goal and we all die eventually...
OR YOU CAN TRY MY WAY.
If all things are pointless, there is no way to attach significance to anything. Now, if you're a pessimist, you'll take this to mean "that means that nothing is significant". But if you're an optimist you can turn this around and say 'if logically I cannot attach significance to anything, EVERYTHING IS EQUALLY SIGNIFICANT'. Everything, no matter how small, becomes something important. In a very real sense, once you acknowledge that nothing has a point, everything has a point.
Or not. Fuck, perhaps I haven't thought this through right yet.
Still, it killed ten minutes to write. Good enough for me!
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2 comments:
As Dan Millman put it in "Way of the Peaceful Warrior", there are no ordinary moments. No moment is more significant than any that preceded or follows it, nor are any more insignificant. Thus, fathering a child = playing WoW = declaring war on Pakistan = working at my desk = reading this blog.
Compare to that the writings of the Hagakure, where the Samurai code of Bushido is laid out, including that "a samurai retainer must be willing to die at any moment in order to be true to his lord." When every moment could be their last, I bet they paid attention to every moment; no matter how dull or insignificant it may have seemed.
And a final thought: doesn't chaos theory state that even the tiniest of events (e.g. butterfly flapping it's wings in Brazil) contribute to the largest (hurricane strikes Texas)? Given how "insignificant" the butterfly appears compared to the hurricane, can anyone truly be certain that a specific event is truly insignificant???
The seemingly random and bizarre nature of our universe stops us from truly knowing anything for certain. We only attach significance to events, words or people because of the emotions we feel when we experience/hear/meet such things. Emotions ARE significance. And that is no bad thing, it means that we can train our selves to attach significance to anything through the use of emotion. We can make even the apparently dull things in the world beautiful, wonderful, fascinating and entrancing.
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