Have you ever thought about how much we project ourselves in this world?
Instead of looking at the world outside us, discovering how it works, and then applying those lessons, we are operating on an entirely reversed thought process.
We look at ourselves, determine what we want, and then demand that from the world. Like overgrown children.
The biggest source of our projection is pity. Pity serves two important functions:
- Social climbing. Showing pity for the less fortunate makes you look like a good guy. More girls will sleep with you, more co-workers will be your buddy, and more people will vote for you or buy your product. They think you’re a “nice person.”
- Self-esteem. If you feel a deep underlying sense of unease, for example because you can intuit that your civilization is collapsing from within, you will need little bits of uplifting happiness during your days. Pity makes you feel good for giving a homeless person $1, a meaningless sum to you, but a big boon to him.
The important note here is that the pity has absolutely nothing to do with the pitied, except that they look like the kind of person who needs to be pitied.
If you’re going to pity someone, make sure they look pathetic so everyone in the room can see who is the giver and who is the receiver.
A suburban kid who has great grades, works really hard and is sharp as a whip, but needs some extra cash to get to college? A terrible pity target: most people out there don’t live in as nice an area as he does, and so are pissed off that he has what they don’t.
A homeless guy who has been addicted to every drug in the book, never kept a job and yet has an inspiring message of love for the world? Perfect pity target. He will never be able to help himself, which means he will always need you. Even better, what he needs is cheap: a room, some liquor, a job.
This attitude immediately spills over into politics and business.
Any public action in a liberal democracy must be done for the downtrodden, underdog, impoverished, miserable, etc. Nothing else provides a potent enough symbol for it to have political power. As a result, we don’t build high speed rail between our universities and libraries and cultural centers, but between our ghettos. Victory for The People!
Any public action on a television commercial or news program must show how the company’s product benefits the weaker, smaller, poorer, more neurotic or less capable. Sure, you can use The Beautiful People for fashion products, but for anything else, you should show crazed modern people and pity objects together enjoying the product. Then you know it’s a good produce from nice people!
Under liberalism, our attitude has gone from “help the deserving so we all benefit” to “help the hopeless so we all feel good about ourselves.”
Whatever civilization replaces ours will first do away with the convenient, but destructive, practice of social climbing through pity.
Nice one :)
I’ve long noticed this phenomenon of projection:
Seeing the world as it is, and not how one demands that it should be, has a lot going for it. A simple mind-shift, that seems beyond the ability of the many.
Is it more reasonable to fit into life, or have life fit into you?
Hi Brett,
Pity always goes out towards people we don’t know. The crazy aunt stealing things from my grandmother? No pity. The deadbeat cousin? No pity. We know these people. They’re making our lives difficult, and even though we may love them somehow, we prefer the sane, the rational, the comforting people in our lives. But then: The crazy lady on the street? Possibly, pity. The homeless kid on the street? Definitely pity. The Poor, an enormous, unseen group of people? Oh yes. Let’s get someone to help them, get them the help they need… as long as we don’t have to deal with them personally.
Unrelated note.
On the comments to a previous post you wrote: “As a nihilist, I was able to see that there is no inherent human order to the universe. It is all a matter of choice: do I choose to shoot myself in the head? Then I will die. Do I choose to live in a mud hut? etc.”
That’s the single most memorable line I’ve read here. I’m interested in this escape from nihilism. Have you written about it before on this blog?
There should be a lengthier blog topic about this. Nihilism is the state of denying all necessity of correlation between the world and human thought; human thought must correlate to the world directly, but the world has no return obligation to take note of us. We are observers and actors, but not dominators. We fit into a hierarchy, and the order of the universe bubbles up from within us, because it is how we are wired and, more importantly, the result of sensible adaptation to the facts of our existence.
Most people exist under the illusion that there is an inherent order to the universe, and that it is human. I call this reversed logic: instead of expecting ourselves to fit within the universe, we expect the universe to fit within us. Reversed logic exists at the intersection of fatalism, narcissism, solipsism and externalization. It is a common error, but unfortunately with social pressures, it can be used to construct an in-group/out-group hierarchy and thus reinforce itself. This is called Crowdism, and it is how civilizations die.
What most people call “nihilism” is in fact the fatalism/narcissism/solipsism/externalization (FNSE) nexus described above, and it is the common root to all liberalism. You will note that almost all who call themselves nihilists are leftist: anarchist mostly, then socialist, then some who are democrats who want to “believe in nothing” except the material and material science, of course. This belief is not nihilism because it still believes in an inherent order.
What I call nihilism is a recognition that we choose the order we want. Different people have different truths and preferences. A genius knight will want a certain type of order that will not appeal to a hunter-gatherer hominin; in the same way, the guy who washes your car will have different needs and wants than the guy who teaches you physics at college. C’est la vie; inequality.
In my view, life gets good when we stop looking for an inherent order and start looking for a sensible one. For example, if we want to live a really good life, we’re sober, chaste, pious, proud and nationalist. We can choose other lives; some people may want to live as impoverished heroin addicts (at least their behavior suggests this). Nihilism is a rejection of the false inherency of human thought, which suggests that an absolute or universal truth exists, because “truth” is determined by human thought-objects and not reality.
I do not view this nihilism as contrary to religion. Rather, I view it as supportive of all beliefs that are not reversed in order, including mythic imagination and through it, idealism and all transcendental concepts of God. Nihilism is suspicious of dualism, but equally suspicious of materialism, and tends to favor monistic systems in which the spaciotemporal/material-energetic reality is a subset of reality as a whole, which is more of an informational order. In this view, nihilism supports mystics like transcendental Christians, Vedantists, Traditionalists, Perennialists, etc. At the most it is nihilistic; it would never be atheistic, because again that is suggesting a universal order. Some will have more God in them than others.
This really needs to be a much longer explanation, and that will be forthcoming. Thank you for noticing :)
That’s a really good reply and gives me a lot to think about. I think this could easily become a basic statement of principles for readers of this site.
I will remember to include it in any such descriptive work. Your input has been very helpful :)
Now there’s an exhaustive reply. Or maybe an exhausting one :)
I do wonder, though, at the effectiveness of using the term “nihilism” for a state contrary to the one most people would understand it to mean…
It’s a handicap for sure. It is however one of many terms I consider to be misplaced and, in my view, re-defining language to make more sense as a whole is one of the first steps toward making philosophy more intuitive. Nihilism = belief in nothing. Belief is a human construct. Reality is not. Nihilism (thus) = recognition of all but that which is solely belief and not corresponding to reality.
A favorite article on this topic:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/
That is some seriously abstract thinking.
You’re right. I agree. But who else is going to?
Maybe it’s not important.
That rather hits on the head what I always took issue with, regarding Christianity: It is about “belief”. Which, as you say, has not much to do with reality. It is eminently possible to “know”, without having to resort to anything so flimsy as “belief”.
That’s more of a Vedantist or transcendental idealist view, which interestingly is shared by many of the most influential Christian mystics, like the wonderful Eckhart.
The concept I always liked from the churches was faith, or a kind of reverent belief in not only the pervasive goodwill but eminent sanity of the order to the cosmos. I think no one should leave home without it.