Nihilism: The Belief in Nothing
“The point is there ain’t no point”- Cormac McCarthy
What is Nihilism? Nihilism is a philosophical and ethical stance which holds that nothing in the world has any meaning, value, or purpose. Followers of this philosophy hold that life should be lived making no moral or spiritual value judgments. Moral value disappears with the death of God. The physical universe does not care about human beings and there are no objective moral truths to be found anywhere. There is no intrinsic good or evil; morality does not exist; values are subjective; there’s no such thing as right or wrong, better or worse — all actions are equally meaningless. As a result, one should not judge the actions of other people; human beings should live as though there was no afterlife (heaven or hell), and live as though nothing we do makes any difference. Nihilists believe that heroes, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, are deluded. There is no point in self-sacrifice because we will all die and disappear completely.
The term derives from the Latin nihil, meaning “nothing.” A key characteristic of nihilism is a belief that all values are baseless: not just untenable hypotheses about reality, but false ideas that cannot correspond with reality at all or which contradict each other. The implications of the doctrine rely on a philosophical…
