According to one of my favorite philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, “there have been two great narcotics in European civilization: Christianity and alcohol”. While this statement can be perceived as ignorant at first, it carries a tremendous meaning and value not only to the European culture, but also to those who strive to think critically and independently. It is perfectly understandable why Christianity remains world’s largest religious group today. It allows people to withdraw from the reality and their true identities to pursue the life in a delusional society. Instead of working for what people really want and desire, they turned to “God” who encourages people to denounce what they really want but cannot get and praise what they do not want but happened to have instead.
For Nietzsche, happiness cannot be obtained through self-sacrifice and devotion to Jesus Christ. Those who identify as Christians prevent themselves to live in freedom and self-realization as every adult creates his or her own categorical imperative. “One must try to affirm one’s actual nature through willpower, not try to create some church-made identity which limits one’s personal development” (Saugstad). Nietzsche claimed that Christianity is a non-progressive religion, because it emphasizes the weak. I believe that instead of giving the weak attention, one must create his or her own true identity and cultivate the strong mind and will-power.
Christians gave up their free-will for the sense of secure future, failing to realize that the future can only be built by people themselves. “God helps only those who help themselves”, my mom used to say when I was a kid. I was baptized as a Greek-Russian Orthodox when I was 12, however, I became a realist (no, not an atheist) during my first year in college. I vividly remember the first time I went to a church, where the preacher was telling people that the life of a true and devoted Christian is suffrage. He kept encouraging our capacity for illusion and became an ultimate guide of living in denial. Therefore, in the Christian values “weakness became goodness, sexless became purity, and not-being-able-to-take-revenge turned into forgiveness”. Religion offers many excuses to be weak and ignorant which leads to a weaken society. Nietzsche understood what the Christian ideas were all about — active sympathy for the weak and self-sacrifice for those who need help.
Whether you think life is suffrage, or you think life is not suffrage, you are right. All of the problems that people face these days are created by people themselves. Because of our self-centered behavior and idea that our problems actually matter, we became ignorant and lost the sense of reality and true importance. The connotations of suffering involve things that are not going the way we want them to. Basically, people tend to “suffer” when life does not meet their expectations (Scharpenburg). Nietzsche argues that life is change, and no change occurs without contractions; suffering is part of growing and overcoming resistance. We live in a chaos where things happen randomly and unsystematically. None of the events in your life carry any specific or valuable meaning and nothing is ever fulfilled.
Alcohol and drugs are used by those who cannot grasp and accept the concept of reality either. They give you a feeling that we interpret as warmness and happiness, even though we may not be happy at all. These substances allow us to detach ourselves from our problems and concerns pushing us to think that our life, in fact, has some sort of delusional purpose or value. Well, it does not. Drugs are drugs. They can’t help people or fill your life with purpose. All they do is alter our consciousness, diluting from reality and blocking problems from bothering you for a brief moment. Alcohol numbs pain and reassures one that things are just as fine as they are. “How little you know of human happiness - you comfortable people”, Nietzsche said, “Christianity and alcohol constantly stop people from living dangerously, spontaneously, and freely”.
While nihilists like myself are not scared of death, we acknowledge the fact that life is short. Yes, the point of life is to live but you should never live in the illusion. We create illusions about our jobs, relationships, friends, money, and in general to shield us from undesired truths. “We do not want to live in reality but are comfortable living in illusion and we believe that somehow the gain far outweighs the effort needed to eliminate them” (Dem). Embracing nihilism and appreciating our meaningless life allows us to break out from this delusional lives and develop a realistic view of the world. When we abandon illusions, life is revealed as nothing; and for the existentialists, nothingness is the source of absolute freedom.
We live in a society where we are conditioned to think either “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”, but we must look beyond these contradictions because life isn't black and white. Life is grey. Take moral relativism, for example, a view that moral judgments are true or false only relative to some particular standpoint. Different cultures often exhibit radically different values. We cannot seriously claim that there are universal morals and ethics shared by every human society. Due to religious decline and different personality traits, moral knowledge is impossible.
Nihilism does not imply that we should give up using moral or ethical language. Morals and ethics are the only way to keep order and peace for those who are unable to think critically or philosophically. There are no universal standards and all emotions or feelings we experience solely come from our own interpretation. Nothing that we fear can harm us but nothing that makes us “happy” can satisfy our needs either. People are in a constant search for something they know nothing about. Can a person become truly happy or is happiness achieved through the constant pursuit of it?
Yin and Yang describes how opposite and contrary forces may actually be complementary and interdependent in our world. Yin represents the darkness, weakness, submission, and death. Yang is characterized by dominance, brightness, birth, and strength. Although they are totally different and opposite in their individual qualities and nature, they cannot exist without each other and can never separate (“TCM World Foundation”). Based on the philosophy of Yin and Yang everything in the universe is cyclical and constant; everything contains principles of its opposite, yet neither pole is superior to the other and a correct balance between the two poles must be reached in order to achieve harmony.
The balance can be skewed as the excess or deficiency is based on your lifestyle. For instance – excessive thinking, worry, stress or negative emotions will lead to imbalance in vital energy in your body (Cartwright). Yin-yang tries to show that life is possible only because of the interplay between the natural forces. Instead of trying to reach the extreme of anything (too much wealth, total happiness, no fear, etc.), one should seek balance between the two as nothing is absolute. Each aspect contains the beginning point for the other aspect. For example, day becomes night and then night becomes day.
A person is capable of feeling pleasure and pain. That means that a person himself is an origin of all the emotions and in control to alter them throughout his or her lifetime. As an autonomous being one should never limit oneself with such destructive emotions or subjective opinions, but rather acknowledge one’s natural motives and feelings. Egoism is not evil, it is a necessity. Universal ethical egoism is the universal doctrine that all persons should pursue their own interests exclusively . Happiness forms within your soul, not what other people think or do. Life has no purpose or meaning, thus, people around you and their actions/opinions/thoughts are meaningless too.
Everybody is constantly trying to build their “happy place” and I do not see a single reason why we should intervene, instead of building our own reality. We all are going to die, whether you like it or not. Many times we struggle with a situation because we fail to acknowledge change or are resistant to it, but if we are attuned to the patterns of change, we have the potential to be a harmonizing force and start to think critically, philosophically, and independently (Sapp). An unexamined life is worth living (sorry Plato).
Eternity is now. Past and present are just the variations of human memories and illusional expectations. Only when we do not live in the past and are not running away to the future, we become free. The balance is what makes life, you know, life. Our lives became structured, almost as we live by the instruction. We feel obligated to follow each step carefully, from graduating high school, attending college, applying for a corporate job, getting married, raising children, and dying.
Understanding that you owe nothing to nobody may be the best thing that will ever happen to you. Existence itself--all action, suffering, and feeling--is ultimately senseless and empty. But since my opinion is probably irrelevant to you, fellow nihilists, I am going to quote someone we can all relate to, Peter Griffin from “Family Guy”. He once said, “You know, that’s the difference between you and me, Lous. When life comes knocking at the door, you go and hide in the kitchen. I fling the door wide open and say, “Peter Griffin here, what do you got?””. Something to think about.
Vestra frui diem!
