Early Access: CHAPTER 4 - WHY DON'T NIHILISTS JUST KILL THEMSELVES? - THE ORDER OF CHAOS

Ever since I began to self-identify as a nihilist, first timidly, and then brashly, I have heard several misconceptions about what nihilism entails, and I’ve also gotten quite an earful about what sort of conduct I should display if I’m really a nihilist. These characterizations are often cartoonishly over-the-top in nature, taking the form of statements like, “If you’re a nihilist, why don’t you just kill yourself? If everything is pointless, why even live?” I could point out that killing myself would be just as pointless as anything else, but that would perhaps be too glib a response.  

We are in the midst right now of a suicide epidemic. Suicide is up 30% over the last 20 years, across the United States. And it’s not just a US problem—it’s a global problem. Suicide is the second leading cause of death globally for people between the ages of 15 and 29. The suicide rate of students in the UK rose 56% from 2007 to 2016. Japan, despite being a much smaller country than the US, has about the same number of suicides annually. What’s really puzzling to a lot of experts is that here in the United States, 54% of people who commit suicide had no diagnosed mental health condition prior to killing themselves.

Depression is a factor, anxiety is a factor, drugs are a factor, and experts look at all of these. But what is often ignored, because it’s more difficult to discuss in an objective or empirical way, is the philosophical dimension of suicide, the beliefs about the world that might lead one to make the decision to end their life.  

I was speaking yesterday with a close friend who has struggled with suicidal feelings throughout their life, and they were talking to me about religion. They were once a very religious person, but now they are an atheist. What they told me is that when they were religious, they still felt suicidal, but suicide didn’t seem like an option. They were always taught by their elders that suicide was nothing more than a one way ticket to Hell, and that anyone who ends their own life cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven. In other words, they were instructed that suicide would not save them from suffering, but only increase it dramatically. 

Religion did not alleviate the suffering they felt from depression or anxiety, but instead simply created the variable of eternal torment in Hell. This Hell variable made the option of suicide less appealing, but with traditional religion on the decline, the threat of Hell’s flames rings ever more hollow, and one consequence is that suicide is back on the table as a rational choice to alleviate the plethora of pains associated with human existence.   

As I said earlier, I consider myself to be a nihilist. And for every person like me who identifies themselves as a nihilist, there are countless others who are nihilists but have never thought to self-apply the label, either because they’re not familiar with the word or because they don’t know what it means. The essence of nihilism is the belief that existence is meaningless, and I think that it would be foolish to deny that there is a nihilistic component to suicide. To kill yourself, you have to reach the point of looking at your pain and your struggle and saying, “Resisting the urge to end my existence is meaningless. My struggles are meaningless. My pain is meaningless. There’s no reason for me to continue to exist in this miserable state. There’s no reason not to end it all.” 

Perhaps it is in the spirit of combatting this nihilistic despair that people attack the very concept of nihilism, painting it in the two-dimensional manner I described earlier. However, those who attack nihilism never do seem to counter it in a substantive way. They say to the nihilist, “You are mistaken to believe that existence is without meaning!” but never do they say, “Here is a cogent definition of meaning, and here is proof that it is present in the universe.” 

The only thing that many of these pseudo-optimists have got is a lot of empty platitudes about the beauty of life, all of which ring hollow to me. Otherwise, they have a delusional fantasy of a God who presides over the whole of existence and who will mete out rewards and punishments in the afterlife depending on our conduct and beliefs as mortal beings.  

Friedrich Nietzsche, the edgiest philosopher ever, postulated that nihilism would ultimately have a deeply corrosive effect on society, that it would undermine all of our moral convictions, our religious convictions, our spiritual convictions, and that we would find ourselves mired in an era of rudderless existential suffering, fatigue and indifference. He also noted that nihilism creates within many of us a desire for destruction, a desire to see the slate wiped clean. Perhaps you have seen the bumper stickers and t-shirts from 2016 that read GIANT METEOR 2016. JUST END IT ALREADY. They’re already reappearing in 2020, with nothing changed but the year. This is an example of a nihilistic urge towards ultimate destruction. Just as a suicidal nihilist longs to end their own suffering with personal destruction, a destructive nihilists seeks to end all suffering with the eradication of all sentient life on this planet.  

There’s a sense of humor to the GIANT METEOR slogan, obviously, but like most humor there is underlying truth. In this case, it’s the truth of nihilism: the very same truth that infests the mind the suicidal person, the truth that none of our struggles are going to culminate in a different outcome than death, and that the totality of our human experiences are as meaningless as the mutterings of a Pentecostal idiot writhing on the floor jibbering in tongues. In that circumstance, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that we would be better off dead than lost in this frustration, confusion, suffering, and despair.  

Some thinkers who have recognized this problem, like recently popular academic Jordan Peterson, have prescribed to us a cure for this state of affairs: a return to the bosom of comforting delusion. We must rediscover God! Nietzsche said God is dead, well then we must find a way to bring him back to life! We must reconnect with the traditions of our ancestors and reset the clock to a time when meaning was king, and not just an antiquated notion from a bygone era!

People are looking backwards, because the way forwards is too fraught with existential peril. I believe this urge is part of the driving force behind Donald Trump’s regressive MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN slogan. People want to be returned to a time “when things made sense.” They fail to realize that the past only makes sense in hindsight. 

I question whether the Jordan Peterson approach is possible, and I reject outright the notion that it is desirable. Life has no reset button that you can press to return to a previous state.  

I need look no farther than myself for the reasons why a return to God is unlikely. In the absence of any new evidence for God, I could no more become a Christian than I could sprout wings and fly. In fact, with the forward march of technology and the rise of transhumanism, it’s far more likely that I will one day have wings than it is that I will one day worship the God of the Bible. Even most of those who do evoke the name of God struggle to believe in him. Even famous religious figures like Mother Teresa, it turns out, found it difficult to maintain their blind faith. 

Even Jordan Peterson, who prescribes a return to God as a solution to our current struggles with post-modernistic thought, can’t give a straight answer to the simple question of “Do you believe in God?” 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPIh1xQiuI8

He goes on like that for 10 minutes. Define God. Define believe. Define Do. Define you. Define the fucking question mark at the end of the sentence. All of the sudden, when faced with this very simple binary choice, he turns into that which he claims to oppose: a post-modernist. Every definition is in question. No word means anything stable or static. I find it remarkable that a man who says that the only true atheist is a murdering, raping savage can’t bring himself to just say “Yes” or “No” when asked directly about his belief in God. He wants to sidestep the burden of proof if he says yes, and sidestep his own obvious atheism if he says no. So instead of a cogent answer to a direct question, we get a massive helping of Jordan Peterson Word Salad, with liquified bullshit as the dressing. 

Now, let’s return to the topic of suicide. This will be easy for me, as contemplating Peterson’s odious stupidity can certainly stir suicidal thoughts. According to a Harris poll from 2016, only about 1 in 3 Americans consider themselves happy at present, meaning that 2/3rds are not happy. Not all of those unhappy people get addicted to meth or opioids or alcohol. Not all of those unhappy people will take their own lives. However, all of those unhappy people are at greater risk for those self-destructive behaviors. I speak as someone who has for the last 6 years or so struggled with a self-destructive affinity for tobacco. I wake up many mornings coughing until I’m light-headed and I wonder why I continue to do this to myself. But I need not wonder, because the obvious answer is that I’m one of the two thirds of my countrymen who are unhappy, and I ultimately see no inherent value in my own existence, nor do I see inherent value in the existence of others. Despite this, I have never, or at least very rarely, felt genuinely suicidal. I have formed some self-destructive habits, but I do struggle against them to some extent, despite my perception that the struggle is ultimately meaningless. I have not prevailed over these failings, but I do put forth some effort, however inadequate it may be. 

When someone says, “If you are a nihilist, then why don’t you just kill yourself?” my response to them is that I don’t want to kill myself. If I did wish to kill myself, and that wish were sustained over an adequate duration of time that I knew it was not merely a passing phase, then I would seriously consider the prospect of doing so. I must admit, suicide can be a comforting thought. When the world becomes too stupid to tolerate, I remind myself that there is an exit, there is a way out, there is a way to end this mortal experience and all that it entails. 

Then I also remind myself of this: death is inevitable. We cannot bargain death away, we cannot buy immortality, we cannot avoid falling under the reaper’s scythe. I find solace in this truth. The destruction of every negative thing that permeates my existence will one day be alleviated by my inevitable death, and good riddance to it. However, by willfully ending my existence prematurely, I am robbing myself of a great deal of positive experiences, and also the chance for personal growth. I might be a miserable 34 year old, but perhaps I will be a joyful 45 year old. I will never know if I don’t persist. And if I fail completely, and my life is nothing but unremittent misery, then death will still come to allay my ennui. I’ve lost nothing by continuing to exist. I’ve merely prolonged my suffering by a few years or decades that amount to basically nothing on the scale of cosmic time. 

I have abandoned notions of objective meaning, objective morality, divine or innate order, and many of the other ideological flourishes of the human animal that we like to imagine are truths, but are really only fabrications, propagated as memes and passed down through the generations, usually for pragmatic reasons such as social cohesion. There are a great number of human concepts that are part of what I like to think of as the pyramid of interdependent subjectivities, which I guess I’d better explain. It’s important to note as we explore this pyramid that I am not attempting to order these interdependent subjectivities in terms of how they should be prioritized. I’m instead ordering them based on how true they are perceived to be by the general populace, with those perceived as most true near the base of the pyramid, and those perceived as least true near the top. 

At the base of the pyramid is so-called objective truth: that which can be directly observed and/or empirically tested. Critical thinkers know that even this level of the pyramid is open to scrutiny. New evidence may lead to a different understanding of reality tomorrow. There are certain assumptions that we must make to even believe in an objective reality. We must assume that natural causes exist for things that happen in the world around us. We must assume that evidence can be used to learn about those causes. We must assume that there is consistency in the causes that occur in the world. And the biggest assumption of all is the assumption that the world is real and that we are suited, on some level, to perceive its reality. 

We must also understand the limits of science, recognizing that there could be explanations of observable phenomena that we haven’t thought of, or that we are incapable of imagining. There could also be phenomena that exist for which no observable evidence exists. And of course, despite our best efforts, human biases have not been entirely removed from the scientific process. In some cases, they inherently cannot be removed from the process, such as in many of the so-called “soft” sciences like psychology, sociology, anthropology, archeology, etc. 

So at the base of the pyramid of interdependent subjectivities, there is what we think of as objective or scientific truth. We tend to ignore the caveats I have mentioned and proceed as though what science shows us is immutable and beyond reproach. I agree that scientific truth is the closest we can come to perceiving and understanding so-called “objective” reality, but we cannot justify our absolute faith in its objectivity. We are ultimately just primates trying to make peace with the subjective nature of reality by pretending that rationality and empiricism have delivered us from the chaos and uncertainty of our biased brains and their unproven (and perhaps unprovable) assumptions. 

On the next level of the pyramid of interdependent subjectivities, we have the mystical truths. These are truths for which no concrete evidence exists, yet many believe them anyway. A mystical truth might take the form of religion, or of spiritualism, or of so-called “objective morality” or any number of other notions of truth that are not tethered to any empirical evidence, but are instead based firmly on instinct, desire, or social pressure. A human being might get it into their head that if they behave in a certain manner and hold certain beliefs, they will survive their own death to inherit a paradise in the afterlife. This is a mystical truth. A gambler might convince himself that he has a lucky number, a number that is likely to win him money on a Roulette wheel. This is a mystical truth. There are countless examples, but a quick and easy definition of a mystical truth is a truth that is believed as fact, but for which no empirical evidence exists.

On the next level of the pyramid of interdependent subjectivities, we have socially pragmatic truth. These are the truths that are not necessarily looked at as facts, but are viewed as being vital and necessary to preserve the social order of any given society. It’s very important to recognize that certain truths can fall onto this level of the pyramid or the level below it, depending on the nature of the individual believer. For instance, a person might believe that rape is wrong because it is inherently a negative act and that the cosmos itself somehow regards it as such. For this person, the immorality of rape is a mystical truth, not a socially pragmatic truth. Another person might believe rape is wrong, not because the cosmos itself or God or whatever has decreed it to be so, but because rape is damaging to the social fabric. For this person, the immorality of rape is a socially pragmatic truth, and not a mystical truth. What you can take away from this is that whether any given position is a mystical truth or a socially pragmatic truth is often contingent not on the belief itself, but on the reasoning behind the belief. 

Even belief in God can, for some people, be a socially pragmatic truth, rather than a mystical truth. There are those who view belief in a religious dogma as a useful social adhesive, something that serves the practical purpose of maintaining the cohesion of a society by giving people a shared belief from which they derive a common morality and a sense of belonging. These people admit that such beliefs are irrational on an evidentiary level, but still think such beliefs are justified by the positive impact they can have on a society. On a personal note, I’d like to say that anyone who holds such views is an idiot. Religion has clearly been a divisive and stunting force for our species, but we will discuss that more in depth in a later chapter.

The next level of the pyramid of interdependent subjectivities is ego truth. These are beliefs and ideas that are recognized intellectually to be subjective, but are emotionally given the weight of truth. For example, I am quite passionate about film, and I believe that my taste in film is superior to the tastes of those around me. So if I say that Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is a masterpiece, and someone else says it is boring drivel, I am going to regard that person as a complete idiot and perhaps even ostracize them. Intellectually, I recognize that film taste is subjective, but emotionally, I am treating my own taste as though it were a higher truth, and should be regarded with greater deference than the ego truths of others. 

Many of us hold onto a great many ego truths, truths that are true for us on a personal level, and so we extrapolate that truth to the world outside of ourselves, even as we recognize that we are committing a fallacy. These truths are essentially opinions that we recognize as opinions, but hold so dearly that we treat them as facts. We feel that they are representative of us on such a deep level, that disagreement with them is tantamount to an attack on our ego and the validity of our perceptions. 

Finally, at the top of the pyramid of interdependent subjectivities, we have opinions. These are the subjectivities that are recognized as subjective on both an emotional and intellectual level. They tend to be very minor things like ice cream flavor preference, favorite color, favorite smell, things of that nature. One might believe that black licorice is a disgusting candy, but it’s unlikely that one would think less of someone else for liking it, or feel that their ego is being attacked or assaulted if someone holds the belief that black licorice is delicious.

The fundamental goal of my nihilism is to recognize and accept subjectivity for what it is, to root out delusional notions of truth, and to come to terms with what I perceive to be the chaotic and disjointed nature of experiential reality. The human psyche hungers for certainty, and for order. Parasites like Jordan Peterson pray on this hunger, selling to confused people the notion that by embracing his idea of order and rejecting the chaos of post-modernistic thought, they can attain a more contented state of being and preserve a more stable social order. 

Peterson is not alone. Many of Peterson’s detractors are every bit as prone as Peterson to fetishize order and vilify chaos. They object not to Peterson’s upholding of order, but rather to the nature of his order. They might say something akin to, “Peterson desires a conservative social order contingent on personal responsibility? Nonsense! We desire a liberal social order contingent upon equality and social justice!” 

Ironically, both Peterson and his detractors, in fighting for competing visions of order, are unwitting servants of beautiful chaos. The chasm between your idea of order and another person’s idea of order is always chaos, is always confusion, is always societal schizophrenia—a car being pulled down two paths at once when a fork appears in the road. 

The gorgeous thing about nihilism is that from it you can proceed in any direction. Nietzsche reasoned that as we embraced Nihilism, it would consign us necessarily to a path of misery, and while I agree that it has done so, I think that he was wrong to think that it must do so. I will attempt to explain myself.  

In a recent video I made about the horrible attack in Christchurch New Zealand, which claimed the lives of 49 people, someone commented that I was making a lot of moral pronouncements for someone who identifies as a nihilist. This is, to my way of thinking, an incorrect assessment of nihilism. I don’t think that nihilism precludes the existence of a moral code, though morality is not what I choose to label my system of ethics. I think nihilism merely forces us into the admittedly uncomfortable terrain of accepting that our moral precepts are as subjective as our taste in films, or our food preferences, or the music we like. In other words, morality is just a matter of opinion.  

Traditionally, this idea has been called moral relativism, which is opposed to objective morality as espoused by most religions and even some secular philosophers. Those who believe in objective morality, I refuse to take seriously until they can demonstrate what specific objective morals exist, and how we can determine their objectivity. For more on this subject, you can revisit Chapter 2: The Art of Morality. 

Moral relativism itself is branched into two factions, or two schools of thought, individual relativism and cultural relativism. Individual relativism states that an individual can create his or her own moral code and live by that, whereas cultural relativism says that one’s society will dictate morality through whatever political means exist in said society, be they democratic or authoritarian or whatever. 

For an example of how individual relativism and cultural relativism have the capacity to confront and change one another, let us briefly revisit the example from Chapter 1 of Martin Luther King Jr. and his struggle for equal rights in a racist country that condemned him and his people to second class citizen status on the basis of their ethnicity. This was an example of the culturally relative morality of codified racism opposing the individually relative morality of Dr. King and his acolytes who demanded equality. Or, even more accurately, it was a battle between the culturally relative notion of codified racism vs. the sub-culturally relative morality of equality regardless of ethnicity. These forces, however you wish to categorize them, clashed in a major way throughout the 1960’s and this clash culminated in a new cultural morality on anti-racism where espousing racism is one of the greatest possible taboos. Thanks in large part to the civil rights movement, it is now the racists who are treated like second class citizens. 

Our conflicts, whether they be small interpersonal disputes, or tribal battles for ideological supremacy, are competing visions of order who duke it out in the arena of chaos. Chaos brings forth change, whether that change represents new ideas or old ones trying to come back. It’s the job of order to implement and codify those changes, to make them the new status quo, until another surge of chaos challenges that status quo, and then the victor of that battle will determine whether the old status quo will remain or a new one will take its place. It’s very important to me to understand how these social forces interact, and how they depend on one another, with chaos being the agent of new creation and order being the defender of those creations—but only after it has fought tooth and nail against them and lost. 

To my way of thinking, a society that is free from pain and suffering is not the ultimate utopia. You can achieve an end to suffering with a gun to the head on an individual level, or with a giant meteor on a collective level. That is not desirable for a species built to survive, built to build, built to climb the ladder of complexity to zeniths not yet dreamed of by even the most starry-eyed futurists. Endings are boring, but plot twists that no one ever saw coming are exhilarating, even when they’re terrifying. So I don’t yearn for an end to pain, I yearn for a society where pain is seen as an opportunity to grow and change, where unrest is a portent not of doom, but of rebirth. A true utopia is a society that embraces chaos and order, each in their own measure, and understand the value of each on not just an intellectual level, but on a visceral one.

We live in an age of ever-increasing chaos, because we live in an age of ever-increasing societal complexity. Those who cannot adjust to the rapidity of change will find themselves ever more deranged by what they perceive as the instabilities of the world around them. For conservative-minded people, this derangement will mount as their jobs are stolen by machines, their cultural identities are destroyed by immigration, their traditional concepts of things like gender are challenged by an increasingly vocal transgender community, their concepts of family are assaulted by gay marriage and other atypical family configurations, and their familiar economic systems are transformed by both automation and an ascendant populist left that is unmistakably making strides towards a post-capitalist future. This is just the beginning of their unrest, however, because if they’re scared of transgender people today, one can only imagine how they will react when transhumanism really begins to coalesce into the vibrant social movement that I predict it will become. If these conservatives are terrified of someone with a Y chromosome getting breast implants and a surgically constructed vagina, then they will be absolutely beset with grief when they are then expected to acknowledge the augmented intelligence 200 IQ winged zebra man with lasers in his fingers, a hydraulic two-headed penis, and a nanobot assisted high-tech artificial heart that will last 1000 years before needing to be replaced. The world is only getting stranger, and for those who yearn for traditional values and “a time when things made sense” there is going to be nothing for them but bitterness and derangement. 

The progressive-minded person will also continue to face a plethora of challenges associated with the complex world that we are all expected to navigate somehow. For one, they will have to deal with an increasingly deranged and upset faction of traditionalist conservatives who will only become more radicalized as society changes at an increasingly rapid pace. Progressives will also find that navigating the intersectionality of the veritable ocean of new identities that will emerge to be a chore of immense mental taxation. The traditionalists will be somewhat spared this adventure by roundly condemning this chaos and all that it represents, but for those who live amidst the chaos, it will be like navigating the worlds most complicated maze wearing a blindfold and being constantly told that they are going the wrong way by everyone else around them. It will be a nightmare of confusion and disarray. Some will become frustrated, and retreat into the welcoming arms of the traditionalists. 

I’m of course venturing into the realm of predicting the future here, and the fallacy of those who predict the future is that they tend to do it by exaggerating their view of the present. I’ve certainly committed that fallacy in this instance, but failing a black swan event that is totally unforeseeable, I think that this is very much how our future will play out. To your right, increasingly radical traditionalists who are in abject terror at what the world is becoming. To your left, the undiluted insanity of seemingly infinite incongruent subcultures trying to navigate a social minefield without anything in common but their contempt for their traditionalist antagonists.

If my vision of the future is correct, how do you find a path through it? The answer is surprisingly simple. Aleister Crowley formulated it in 1904 when he wrote, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” He’s referring here not to satiating every impulse towards hedonism, though he certainly was a hedonist, but towards following what he called your “true will.” Whatever path you find yourself called to walk, you should walk. And if that path creates chaos, then so be it. If it creates order, so be it. If it leads to nowhere, so be it. In an infinite and unsolvable maze located in a nihilistic and uncaring universe, there is no justification to call any path forward wrong. So you can walk any path self-assuredly, but just be sure it is the path you truly wish to walk. If you are obstructed, then do all you can to destroy or subvert the obstacle. If you should be destroyed or imperiled, accept it with the fervor of a zealot who knows that all paths lead to obliteration. 

Critics of this worldview will no doubt summon up the specter of Hitler or some other notorious monster of human history. “Should Hitler have walked his own path? His path led to the destruction of 6 million lives!” Let me first say that if a new Hitler emerges, he or she will be an acolyte of order, not a child of chaos. He or she will represent a violent attempt to restore the world to a former state, and he or she will be followed by those who share his or her regressive desire for a return to a simpler time.  

For the children of chaos, there will be no Hitler. There may be the occasional Charles Manson, but such figures will fail to accrue a large enough following to achieve despotism of any kind. They will be operating in too disparate and fractured a social order to accumulate Hitler-esque levels of power.  

If this future I predict does not come to pass, then you can disregard this portion of the book. Nonetheless, as you proceed through this world, know that nihilism need not chain you to despair. It can be a force of immense liberation, freeing you to explore avenues of being that your shackled-to-doctrine ancestors couldn’t have even conceived of. To be a fully actualized nihilist is to realize that you have the power to walk any path you choose. Suicide is just about the lamest thing you could do with such a power. It’s my belief that anyone who can overcome fear enough to shoot themselves in the head can also overcome fear enough to walk the path they truly long for. Whatever holds you back, reject it. If family stands in your way, disown them. If society stands in your way, burn it down. If you are at war with yourself, pick a side and kill the part of you that causes you to hesitate. Whatever excuse you’re making right now, reject it. Nothing matters, so it doesn’t matter if you fail, and success if whatever you want it to be. This means you have no excuse not to try. 

You may find that your own mind is chaos, and that even you do not know the path you truly desire. However, even in this circumstance, I’m willing to bet that you know the path you don’t wish to walk, so don’t allow the paralysis of indecision to default you onto a boring path laid out for your by the expectations of those who imagine they are your peers, or by the machinations of those who think they are your masters. 

Children of chaos, go forth and fuck shit up!