On the Justification of Nihilism
Estimates of “the total number of people who have ever lived” published in the 2000s range approximately from 100 to 115 billion.
An estimate of the total number of people who have ever lived was prepared by Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau in 1995 and subsequently updated in 2002; the updated figure was approximately 106 billion. Haub characterized this figure as an estimate that required “selecting population sizes for different points from antiquity to the present and applying assumed birth rates to each period”. Given an estimated global population of 6.2 billion in 2002, it could be inferred that about 6% of all people who had ever existed were alive in 2002.
- World population at Wikipedia.org
Assuming that you could meet each of the 115,000,000,000 people who have ever lived for exactly one second, it would take you 3,646 years to meet each of them (though the birth rate – 157,500,000 children per year – would ensure that you never catch up).
One, one-thousand…
How much can you learn about a person in one second?
What lasting impact can any -
…. two, one-thousand…
- individual have if it would take more than a year to simply recall the names of each person born that year?
…. three, one-thousand…
Will your existence matter in one hundred years, after tens of billions of others of your kind have born, aged, and died?
…. four, one-thousand…
Consider, for a moment, what it is that makes you different – are you really that different from the 114,999,000,000 people whose names you can’t remember?
…. five, one-thousand…
LIAR!
Admit it, you can’t even remember one million other peoples’ names.
…. six, one-thousand…
Try it, write them down.
I’ll wager you recall less than 10,000.
…. seven, one-thousand…
You know what the odds are of being an Einstein or a Charlemagne or a Nebuchadnezzar or even a Judas Iscariot?
…. eight, one-thousand…
They’re infinitesimal.
You’re infinitesimal.
…. nine, one-thousand…
You hardly even matter in the solipsist dream you like to pretend the rest of us trespass upon…
…. ten, one-thousand…
i think there’s a nihilistic tendency when you try and take a meta-perspective apart from one’s life. i think the perspective is largely artificial and meaningless in that you’re anthropomorphizing the universe in saying that one is infinitesimal (it assumes that anything MATTERS to the universe [like it has some agenda where components are unequally significant]). so, when you’re talking about what *matters*, you’re already putting a human-spin on it. i don’t find it hard to believe that everyone you know matters quite a large deal (if only to you). i don’t think it’s grossly sentimental to think this either, as you’re the one delimiting what’s important, good and bad in your own relativistic way.
it just so happens that we share many values because we all have similar needs and we can take for granted statements like “exercise is important”, “killing is bad” and “chocolate is good”. if one could transcend themselves (a meaningless hypothetical), sure everything would be for naught, but i don’t think it’s really applicable to our lives.
I don’t believe that there is a lack of clarity in the words I chose:
If you are arguing that the experience of all humanity or the task of meeting every person who has ever lived is a construct, I can see where you’re coming from but I must maintain that your expressed views represent the lack of perspective critiqued:
… thence the need to transcend hard-wired cognitive bias.
How will our species ever amount to more than a self-centered and hypocritical colony of internecine resource-wasters if we continuously fail to grasp the big picture or consider what it really means to be human?
I honestly believe the things we’ve ascribed “greater meaning” to need to be razed and replaced with something more meaningful than unrestrained procreation, religious zealotry, or what-have-you.
If we can’t come up with a better reason for existing than our forebearers (“Because I don’t want to die.”) I can accept that – thus far it’s the most reasonable meaning we’ve been able to muster without imagining ourselves some supernatural purpose or powers – but that intrinsic raison d’etre isn’t going to inspire me to do much more than exist as comfortably as I can until my body fails me… and that ultimate strategy, applied one hundred billion times over, has a lot to do with our present predicaments.
i really think that i DO understand your critique but find it a bit abysmal in its view of our common condition. i understand you to be saying that a life is insignificant because of the fact that there are so many past, present and future people. broken down, we won’t measure up to influential historical figures, and, even if we DID measure up, it wouldn’t matter because our influence on the future or present is insignificant anyways given the near infinite nature of it all.
i reiterate that i think the perspective that you’re elucidating is artificial. this is not to say it’s “fake”, but just to say it’s constructed by a mind without any real-world precedent (which is what i mean by meaningless — having no physical-expression). there is no transcendental being (as far as i can see) that’s judging what’s significant and what’s not. to say, “objectively such-and-such doesn’t matter” is to take an imaginary perspective (to try and assume a position OUTSIDE yourself and then JUDGE yourself by it is abstracted from reality in the 2nd degree). i’m suggesting that it’s an interesting thought exercise, but you don’t have to put the bleak spin on it. what we DO know, if we know anything at all, is that some things are important to us.
i understand that people might reflect on the cosmos or the grandeur of the universe and be humbled. i’m not sure how you can take these facts as evidence that one should or shouldn’t behave a certain way though. you might say that one should see their short-comings on a grander scale and strive to be more than infinitesimal (even in vain) or one could see the other side of the coin and think, “FUCK IT! why not just try to live comfortably before i die?” i think that maintaining a sense of life’s importance and others’ significance isn’t a detriment to one’s “quality of life” or anything else. i’m not sure what “greater meaning” there is than that, but i’m open to suggestions.
To take a step back, the post was originally intended as a diatribe against the self-centered, given that (as you stated) there is no objective center between each person’s subjective experience.
Think about it – are we not, as a species, prone to self-centered behavior? The more enlightened amongst us might very well sacrifice for “the good of humanity” but, as time has proven, people do not understand what will actually make them happy and humanity as a whole does not strive for much beyond comfortable living (even as the possibility thereof is sabotaged by the actions of religious factions, political factions, and smaller self-serving factions).
I am merely suggesting that our limited capabilities and existences should be held less dearly until we transcend our regressively violent and wasteful tendencies (if such a thing is possible) – see also: On Humanity.