Edward Norton in Fight Club (An insomniac, depressed and nameless protagonist who represents the banality of modern life).
Any average person’s opinion on life will be unflatteringly the same: “EVEN THOUGH LIFE IS HARD, IT IS WORTH LIVING.” And this kind of optimism has been with our species since its inception. We are all, unfortunately, beings that harbour the illusion of having a self-assured sense of sensory experiences programmed with total assurance that we’re each somebody unique, but in fact, everyone’s a nobody. We’re technically speaking organic matter decaying concerning time. Biological puppets with the illusion that we have total control of our lives. But the truth is that we are just slaves to our biological urges, which, to our convenience, have evolved to propagate our worthless and malevolent species.
Since November 24, 1859, the day when Charles Darwin released his ground-breaking work on evolution, aptly titled “Origin of Species,” God has since been slowly fading out of the Western picture. One can also say that this was the day that “God truly died.” Since then, as we now know, we are just creatures of random mutation and not heavenly creation. Our purpose in this infinite and meaningless universe has been dwindling. Scientific progress cannot probably answer such a fundamental question because of the lack of objectivity in the question itself. Even in the near future, if we colonize other planets, we will still be left with this existential dread. I feel it’s prone to our species till the end. And if one shall take the mind-numbing step to believe in a deity for a purpose, it shall be in vain too. As the French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre concluded, even if a God exists and gives us all a purpose, the purpose itself would be devoid of any substantial meaning and be reinforced by the authority of God itself.
When faced with this existential calamity, an individual has apparently three choices that he can undertake. The first is to “believe in a God you choose or that has been chosen for you by the geographical location in which you were unfortunately born.”
If you are foolish enough to choose this option, you are committing what philosophers call “intellectual suicide.” Because no matter how much pain or suffering led you to worship a deity that doesn’t change the ontological truth about God itself and is nothing but an example of intellectual dishonesty, I’ll go as far as to say, “Childish ignorance.”
The second way is to commit actual suicide to alleviate one’s suffering, whether caused by existential dread or megalomania caused by today’s capitalist race. This is also quite an unreasonable but effective method. As the Romanian-French philosopher Emil Cioran snarkily commented on the aforementioned topic, “You always commit suicide way too late.”
The third aforementioned solution should be the annihilation of our feeble and malignant species. We should collectively stop reproducing and walk hand in hand into extinction. This is the only logical way to completely alleviate our collective suffering as a species. Now obviously, one might be so inclined to dismiss this as “juvenile” or “precocious.” This scorn for our species has been quite an ancient one.
Even though Nihilism, as it is now, started during the discourse of Kantanian and post-Kantanian philosophy and was coined by the German-Swiss esotericist Freidrich Heinrich Jacobi, this scorn from our recorded history can be traced back to Diogenes the Cynic, who disregarded every form of social norm existing and was quite similar to the modern pessimist. Not boring the reader with historical baggage is key to spreading the message to the average reader, who spends as much time reading as they mindlessly scrolling through reels.
Coming back to the topic of religion and how it blinds the truth, one can observe that any patron who visits any temple, mosque, or church has either a propensity for poverty or another degrading term that will aptly be “a yin-yang for fairytales.” From this crowd, it will be safe to assume no one will certainly be spilitting the atom. Any religious narrative will absorb the dread and misery of the patron, and this will be effective to the extent of the amount of certainty the narrative can project; it’s catharsis. Some evolutionary biologists, most notably the English biologist Richard Dawkins, who coined the term “meme” in his 1976 ground-breaking book “The Selfish Gene,” remarked that memes are ideas that propagate quite rapidly throughout civilizations. One notable example is the origin of the rhyme “Mary has a little lamb.” Even if you are in the most remote part of the Amazon, one has heard the rhyme in one’s life.
Religion, according to Dawkins and many other anthropologists, is believed to be a meme, a set of ideas spreading along civilizations, spreading the plague of misinformation and fabricated lies. Some anthropologists think of religion as a language virus that rewrites pathways in your brain and dulls critical thinking.
Often people who come across the topic of Nihilism think it to be utterly depressing and defeatist in nature, and it is to some degree, but if one views the bigger picture, it’s the most freeing thing one can embrace. A Nihilist can’t plot a revolution or a bomb or want to propagate his ideas(irony spotted); he knows it’s meaningless and quite a fruitless effort because things most probably will revert back to the same. A Nihilist isn’t bound by societal constructs and values and can indeed live happily without any societal pressures. Making money is also not the priority of a Nihilist because, again, it’s very fruitless. After your basic needs are taken care of, i.e., food, shelter, and clothing, one can’t get any happier with money. It’s just a downward spiral into consumerism after that. The capitalistic society tells you earning money is a virtue. This same society has enabled the common man to view education not as a means to ensure gaining knowledge but as a means to ensure employability. Long past the days when people learned for the sake of learning, everything has become a product in terms of earning money; this is the root cause of today’s suffering. Advertisements have one chasing new cars, clothes, and the latest fashion trends set by some illiterate bimbos. A nihilist is by definition free from all these shenanigans.
The saddest part of our existence is its purpose. Thanks to Darwinism, we are now very well aware that the sole purpose of our existence, if we regress further enough, is to replicate copies of our DNA through reproduction for the continuation of our feeble species. And this purpose would be sufficient if not for the “Evolution of Consciousness.” The Norwegian philosopher Peter Zapffe thought of consciousness as a “blunder of evolution.” Out of the millions of species present on this tiny speck of a planet, only one species (as we know it) can be self-aware of one’s demise. Zapffe argued that mankind became too self-aware, that nature created an aspect of nature itself, and that we as a species should not exist by natural law. We are all just accretions of sensory experiences programmed with total assurance that we’re each somebody unique, but in fact, everybody is a nobody.
For Zapffe, the ideal thing we as a species should do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, and ride ourselves into the blissfulness of extinction. Here Zapffe goes far beyond the Anti-Natalist argument, i.e., it is morally wrong to bring children into this world devoid of meaning.
The non-existence of Homo sapiens certainly outweighs the existence of one, so on the moral scale, it is better to have never been born. The aforementioned views are from the South African philosopher David Benatar, whose views can be seen as a watered-down version of Zapffe, or, shall I say, more appealing to the masses? Now as for the topic of Nihilism in this present day and age, it is essential for surviving in today’s hustle and bustle. Our ultra-capitalistic society has ingrained in us never-ending optimism, which is a virtue. You just strive and strive to become better. You can produce more output that will make our employer happy, and in return, it’ll make the system a hefty profit. Nihilism in this state helps one free himself from the oppressive tentacles of the free market and just stop caring. This doesn’t imply “Don’t do anything.” That would be a rather dumb suggestion. Just stop taking life that seriously; in the end, we’ll all eventually perish. Nothing will matter. That’s why nihilism is freeing.
And the conclusion is that life isn’t worth living.
