The Freedom of Meaninglessness

In pure theory, nihilism should produce death, both actual and philosophical. Anything that attempts to answer "What does it all mean?" with the response "It doesn't mean anything" is a killing force. Life is meaningless, so why live? Philosophy is meaningless because it can't answer anything with certitude, so why think? And I, to an extent, subscribe to a kind of nihilism. I put on various religions and philosophies for a time and think within those terminologies and mindsets without ever completely subscribing to them. I live a life of mental and spiritual convenience. That sounds extremely meaningless. Why bother? Why even bother to continue in an existence that I don't feel has any point or any true worth? There have been gods, there has been God, there have been new gods of politics and humanism and ideas that are invested with all the power of the absolute. Those who live with or beneath these gods can't see what I am doing, don't understand. To them, even to Nietzsche, nihilism was the downfall of civilization as we know it. Nearly everyone elevates some principle or concept to a divine status. Nearly everyone exists with a certain perception of relativity but their relativity does not permit them to tear down their own deities and moral codes. I think mankind has a terrible fear of believing that their own thoughts might be wrong or, even worse, pointless. This may not be absolutely true but the way we live life is as a stream of thoughts and sensations and emotions. To cast those into doubt casts into doubt everything we believe about ourselves. Terrifying prospect.

There's the old song and dance about how if you say it is true that nothing is true, you've just contradicted yourself and what you said is a lie. That's an easy way to try to trip up relativists and nihilists and postmodernists and all sorts of nasty folk. But it doesn't hold water. It's a word game that people have been playing since the time of the ancient Greeks, possibly before. The fact is that underlying every statement about something not being "true" is the assumption that it is not absolutely true. We are born believing in the evidence of our senses and, as we grow, we come to trust completely the evidence of our thoughts about our senses. Part of what is so frightening about feeling you are going mad is that you have torn from you that security that you know and think about the world around you correctly. But one doesn't have to be slipping into psychosis to find evidence that the world around us is not what we think it is. Most people have experienced something along the lines of catching movement out of the corner of their eye and nothing being there or thinking their name was just called and turning around and no one did so. Just one such experience should be enough to cause us to discount the so-called "evidence" of our senses. And if we can't trust something as basic as our eyeballs seeing correctly, why are we supposed to put complete faith in an ancient holy book or some random philosophy or Marxism or Rush Limbaugh or anything else that we are expected to just accept as true? People talk about their various beliefs and frequently resort to attempting to prove its reality by claiming they experienced directly that it is true. God speaking to them, watching a town apply a new political philosophy and it works miracles, etc. I am not convinced by such arguments. It is the need for security and stability and trust in the world as we know it that causes us to give so much weight to what we experience. Because if we were to admit that we might be mistaken about the causes or our perception of our experiences, we might just become a little more nihilistic and that's not good. But, in spite of what Dr. Phil says about "Would you rather be right or happy?" I would rather be right than clutching to what makes me feel secure even if it is completely off-base. Many is the time in history that a general looked across the battlefield and saw a small force of enemies and rushed in to attack and found out that the rest of the opposing force was hidden somewhere and rushed in and flanked him and his soldiers and won the day. Our senses and experiences, no matter what our hearts may wish for, are like the crafty enemy general who knows how to divide his men and flank his foe and find victory.

So, I've just spent two run-on paragraphs demolishing what is, in my view, the grave error of clinging to the notion of absolute truth. We can try to deceive ourselves but, in the end, we will all reach the end of our sojourns in this world without the slightest clue what it was all about than we had when we showed up. So, what about my opening question about why do I carry on if I believe in a universe that is, as far as I can ever know, completely meaningless? Why do I read philosophers and why do I not put a bullet in my head or start running pedestrians down in my car? Simple. I do not know if freedom exists. I do not know if we are not predetermined to do everything we do by genetics and environment. So I don't claim to be preaching freedom. But, I have found that in a functionally meaningless existence, freedom is the greatest prize to be found. You are free to interpret the evidence of your senses and thoughts and emotions however you choose. If there is no overarching font of ultimate morality, then we are free to invent our own moral codes. Some people view that idea as a harbinger of the apocalypse. I'm fine with bringing about the end of the world as we know it. Because the world as we know it hasn't worked in eons. Those who see decadence and Babylon and Armageddon around every corner don't seem to realize that people have been saying that for thousands of years. It hasn't come yet, why do you think it will pop up tomorrow because some poor teenaged girl got an abortion or a dude got high or someone you didn't vote for got elected anyway? It's a kind of hubris to think that the end times have just been holding off until WE showed up to smash the wickedness of humankind.

This freedom we find in meaninglessness is the freedom to assign meaning as we see fit. Despite Nietzsche not being a nihilist, he did see the end of meaning foreshadowed in his day and, very wisely, set about constructing his own meanings. Whether we realize this or not, nihilist or devout Muslim, we all go about creating our own meanings anyway, in the unceasing stream of our thoughts and emotions. We won't stop finding meanings until we die and, despite anyone's evidence that their beliefs are true, we will never know how factual our beliefs are unless we die and suddenly find ourselves face to face with God and in his infinite wisdom, he deigns to tell us what we wish to know. I do not personally believe that but I use my freedom of choice to allow that I could be wrong to doubt it and I may show up at the foot of his throne one day, facing judgment or love or whatever other motivations could cause a divine being to create such a wonderful, flawed, dreadful and beautiful race as we humans. So, believe what you will but do not ask yourself or me why I think what I do and still keep on keeping on. It's abundantly clear that where I find my enlightenment is in the utterly free world of knowing I can think anything I wish and eventually, I may have thought everything there is to think and lived more lives than there are people on this earth.