this picture will never not be funny
just the absurdity of donald duck putting out that statement (which even makes some sense and fits donald’s overall depressed mood) and mickey mouse being the sly one and contradicting donald, coming out with the upper hand from the argument, is just so amusing.
This is where you’re fucking up. You’re choosing to distinguish, for no reason, what a person believes from who that person is. People do believe things, and people do cause harm: they’re one in the same.
Racists, for instance, believe in a racial hierarchy. Should we not fight racial hierarchy?
Almost every time I’ve heard somebody say something like Donald Duck, they’ve turned out to be people who believed in and fought for nothing. Voting is pointless, kindness is pointless, death is pointless, being likable is pointless—this is an absurdly depressive, and I would say mentally ill, reality to subscribe to.
And this is important, because this reality is one that nazis on 4chan have been using for some 15 years to groom people, disarming them of their good nature. To go a step further, 4chan nazis are the Maga movement, and the Maga movement is a suicidal one. I’m not being hyperbolic. The penguin that wanders off into the mountains in search of glory will die there. It knows this.
You, CarbonIceDragon, have to inoculate yourself against this psychic damage. You, CarbonIceDragon, have to believe in our ability to build a better future. You have to have hope. Nihilism does not carry hope. Like in Danganronpa, hope is the battle for which we are fighting.
Nihilism carries plenty of hope; it carries the hope that the values we make for ourselves, our subjective experiences, are the highest basis we have to judge ourselves on, that we are not a cog in somebody elses cosmic machine, or at least that if we are, that someone ultimately has no more valid a claim to us than we do. A universal meaning, if one exists, has a potentially infinite number of things that it could be, so if one exists, we almost certainly will fail to live up to it, despite any effort we make, and that notion I find horrifying. But you cannot fail if there is no goal, you can do what you want, and as humans are a social species, what we want, on average, is to live well, to be kind and experience kindness. Absent some other mission, this is what people try to do, without really needing to think too much about it.
I do not get this “nihilism means you feel everything is hopeless” notion, despite it being commonly repeated, because if nothing matters, nothing requires you to give up. There is no reason not to keep going, and since humans are ultimately wired to want and need and care about things, hope for the future is the default state. The people that tell you to not vote, or not be kind, or similar, on the grounds that things are all pointless, are not actually following nihilism, because they act as if that implies there is a universal mandate for inaction, not simply no mandate.
Beyond that, theres the matter that, well, I simply dont see a mechanism from which a universal meaning and purpose could arise (short of an actually omnipotent entity existing and using its power to decree such a purpose, but since I also believe such entities are self-contradicting and impossible, I cant accept that one). Purpose to my use of the term implies artificial creation to fulfill some role, an ultimate purpose then would somehow have to mean that the sum total of all things was created by some intelligent entity, except that entity would also be a thing that therefore would have to have retroactively created itself, which is paradoxical. Even if, for the sake of argument, I did think that the idea of a meaningless universe was mentally unhealthy, I cannot simply decide that idea is factually wrong simply because I didnt want it to be true, my brain just does not let me consciously change my beliefs without being convinced to the contrary like that. There are a great many things that I wish werent true, and yet think are regardless. This isnt one of them, but that isnt the reason I think it.
Not inherently. What you’re describing is nihilistic optimism, that’s the thing that I subscribe to, and you’re pretending that it’s the only kind that exists.
There are people who want it to be this way. Grifters and pessimists.
You can, actually.
There are no facts to speak of here. You’re bringing facts over the is-ought gap. If meaning cannot come from the universe itself, then you socially construct the universe you want to live in.
The universe that I choose to live in is a hopeful one. The universe that 4chan nazis choose to live in is a suicidal one.