Willie Nelson

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Some believe that life is ultimately chaotic and unstructured. Paradoxically some of these people go on to embrace the idea of a deterministic Universe. They may rise to being a skeptic of any and all efforts to see order in life and deny any personal power over the circumstances of everyday events.They choose to see people as profoundly helpless and powerless in the face of an impersonal, irrational and unpredictable existence.For them human language is the inevitable result of our freakish biology. They believe the ascendancy of English as the first global language unavoidable and unplanned. If Mandarin succeeds English as the dominant global language it would be a random act of inconsistent fate.

For these people it is only ignorance, arrogance and hubris to think otherwise.

The codification of the rule of law was an inescapable feature and as formless as drops of rain on a windshield and as unique as the pattern of a snowflake. These, the development of the transistor and the works of Beethoven, are equally unforeseen products out of a sea of infinite possibilities.

We would live in a clockwork universe with endlessly morphing gears. Synchronizations are momentary and their prediction endlessly elusive. We are at the mercy of causes and effects that pop into and out of existence without the possibility of explanation.

Our choices are illusions.

Our creation is the result of a role of the dice. We will live out lives that we have no control over and have no meaning. We will return to the white noise and background static of a cosmic storm that never ceases to rage.

The volition to act or not act upon a base instinct is a delusion. We will do only what we will do and nothing else. The actions of others are both proscribed and illogical. What will be will be. Hope and fear are equally futile and impotent.

To these people all I can do is to speak from my own experience.

I know only too well that all arguments to the contrary are in vain. There is no answer to those who would doubt everything. I know because I have been there. That place is called nihilism.

When I have been nihilistic my life becomes an endless fall down Alice’s rabbit hole. I have been at the mercy of forces beyond my understanding and immune to my influence. I have felt that there is no reason for why things are as they are.

But I have not persisted in being a nihilist. I found out that this mental state, this strange unbelieving belief system, was a step in a predictable and predicted evolution.

Friedrich Nietzsche predicted it.

Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that humanity could come to a point where everything would become the same and all distinctions would disappear. He thought this was more likely than the alternative fork in the path. He didn’t have positive expectations for humanity.

But Friedrich Nietzsche did theorize an alternative path. He allowed the possibility of the emergence of the superior human. He said that if people could learn to make distinctions then there was hope and humanity would enter a golden era.

I am not about to explain Friedrich Nietzsche in a single blog post. If you are interested then you will look him up. Just for a clue, contrast the Ubermensch with the Last Man.

I am not going to list all the great thinkers who have taken the alternative fork in the path. Yes, it is an impressive list. I know that no list of mere mortals would be convincing to a nihilist.

But know that you have a choice.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a philosopher. Another philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, claims philosophy creates concepts. That is what we are dealing with here, concepts.

You have the power to make distinctions between concepts, if you believe you do.

I chose to step away from nihilism.

I am glad I did.

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