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Friedrich Nietzsche: The truth is terrible

109 points by secondary 8y ago

some_account 8y ago
What actually is happening is people being indoctrinated with a view of themselves and the world as being animals spinning around a rock with no purpose and no meaning. This is how the powers that be wants us to feel, and it's the point of going through the education system, shaping us into specialized workers, with relief coming from consuming things. It seems very few people realize what is going on. It's no accident the world was told to be round in the 1500s, because in order to make people believe we are pointless small little hairy apes, you first have to create the understanding that we are not special and have no purpose. Let the downvoting begin :) Hacker news readers are usually unable to even consider things like what I said. It's natural to assume people like me are just dumb, but reality is not that easy.
- Drakim 8y ago
  It's so much easier to imagine that there is a grand, fantastic, and amazing conspiracy, and that ultimately when the curtain is pulled down it will all make sense and the truth will be clear. No more confusion, no more enfeebled helplessness, no more spinning around in a universe where directions are meaningless. The evil will be pushed back and things will go back to how they ought to be, in perfect harmony. By romanticizing the world this way, it all becomes so much easier, it's an easier pill to swallow because it's a bitter taste that we are familiar with. And there is an allure of sweetness behind the taste, the idea that ultimately there is an inherent wonderful good truth waiting, just around the corner. But it's ultimately an illusion, there is no grand conspiracy, and when there carpet comes down we find only empty space behind it. It can be both terrifying and liberating to accept that.
  - some_account 8y ago
    No no, this is not some romanticizing fantasy image that I dreamt up after a couple of glasses of wine one night :) I'm a hard-core geek, programmer, tinkerer since I got my first computer in 1985 or so. I'm working as a data engineer and cloud architect currently. My IQ is fine and I dont believe in fairies :) All I did was research the history of our societies. Who controls what, who benefits from what, stuff like that. And there is actually a big conspiracy going on when it comes to our world view and our place in this world. There are sites purely set up for propaganda, like flat earth society, who explains gravity with "yeah so the world is currently traveling upwards at a constant rate, and that is gravity"... Lol :) Nobody actually believes that. It's just to turn people off from the idea, and it's working. It's been the Google number one hit since like forever, and it's designed that way :) All this makes sense if you understand what the purpose is, but people usually spend like 10 minutes, go to the wrong sites, and laugh it off :) Go to Eric dubays videos on YouTube, go through the ones where he goes through how things are working according to flat earth theories. Its highly interesting. There see more than one way to explain what we see.
    - wruza 8y ago
      Given how much effort you have to put into a local progress and how many ‘energy’ and knowledge is lost on progress that crosses the company/group/area/country boundary, it is a very small femtochance that any worldwide conspiracy exists. Obviously, the capital and power has to be accumulated in relatively few hands, but it seems too doubtful that at least one of our species is capable of managing and routing that in the way you describe. It may appear as such to some idiots with megatons of money and clear minds behind them, so they form their elite clubs, but no more than that. Anyone who did something complex should have seen that clearly. We as a whole civilization are just an uncontrollable mess.
      - andai 8y ago
        To clarify, are you saying there is an illuminati, but they really suck at their job?
    - maxerickson 8y ago
      That guy is just babbling incoherently. Like, he thinks that summer happens at the same time across most of the planet and that the fake science explains seasons with the elliptical orbit of the earth (this is commonly noted as a misconception¹). Please stop spouting this nonsense here. 1. https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/seasons-causes.html https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/seasons-causes.html
  - AmericanChopper 8y ago
    This is really only one possible interpretation of the absurd. The collective absurdist philosophers all tended to agree that when confronted with the apparent meaninglessness of life there were 3 general responses possible. 1. Suicide (not widely advocated for in philosophy circles) 2. A leap of faith (essentially to impart your own meaning to life) 3. Embrace of the meaninglessness It seems to me like you may be advocating for the 3rd option? Logically speaking, it’s equally as valid as the other two, but it does have one major shortcoming in that it doesn’t naturally lead to any conclusions. Personally I see more value in the 2nd option, but it does come with the added baggage of settling on or coming up with your own values system.
    - Drakim 8y ago
      Taking a leap of faith option is probably the most common and orthodox solution. While religious themes comes to mind, it's not really limited to religion, tons of people find non-religious causes and beliefs to hold onto, like humanism, skepticism, trans-humanism, social justice, or other variants. Common to all of these is a specific narrative, a foundational belief that deep down, once you wash away the topsoil, it all makes sense, that there is an unshakeable and unmovable bedrock waiting. Sure, there is sand and water shaking our feet today, but deep below awaits solidity and surety. That ultimately, Truth is our steadfast ally. And that the only real way to find meaning and sanity is to root yourself to that bedrock. But what happens that day when we dig down and find nothing? When we realize that we are floating aimlessly in space towards nowhere, untethered from all meaning? If we have tied all our worth, thoughts, and values to that imaginary rock then we'll have nothing left.
      - AmericanChopper 8y ago
        I agree that the leap of faith is the most common way people choose to live. But you seem to be describing it from a perspective of somebody who’s never asked themselves the question, or who gave up trying to answer it. To properly arrive at the leap of faith, you need to first accept that there are no universal truths. Then you can choose some axioms to base meaning on, and build outwards from there. I don’t believe that this approach is truly that orthodox, even if it may arrive at a similar destination to not asking the question to begin with. There is no universal truth anywhere in life. Even empiricism is based on our subjective experiences, and rationalism is also flawed in exactly the same way. Life itself doesn’t offer any bedrock of truth, but that doesn’t mean truth doesn’t exist. You can take the leap of faith and create your own truth in life.
- slededit 8y ago
  > It's no accident the world was told to be round in the 1500s I'm actually confused about two things: First are you implying the world is flat or some other theory? Secondly, Why does a round earth imply we are insignificant. It seems the shape of a rock in space is irrelevant to our importance.
- bitexploder 8y ago
  Please drop the hyperbole of your last three sentences. HNers are smart enough to read your words without a classic "but you won't listen anyway". It adds nothing. Now then. This question of purpose is the same now as it was for the ancient Greeks 2000+ years ago. Not a lot has changed about the human condition, even in the modern age of consumerism. I would implore you to look at how the ancient philosophers viewed their world. This rant could have been written by one of them.
- MadSudaca 8y ago
  > It's natural to assume people like me are just dumb, but reality is not that easy. How do you know yourself that you're not dumb?
  - some_account 8y ago
    I imagine if I was dumb, I would have trouble learning new things and be more interested in having education tell me what the truth is. Then I could just relax, knowing I know the truth since they told me. :) Would be an easy life!
    - Fnoord 8y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
- h0l0cube 8y ago
  Heliocentrism along with 'roundness' of the earth was first hypothesized ~300bc by Aristarchus [1], and the circumference of the earth was first estimated some time later by Eratosthenes [2]. The scientific inquiry and its attack on religion unsurprisingly seems to align itself with the intellectual strides of humanity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_of_Samos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_of_Samos [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  But nothing is meaningless. Everything has exactly the meaning the individual asking the question decides it has. It is your freedom as well as responsibility. As an atheist I actually read the thoughts of some church intellectuals, for example once something from some bishop in the Vatican, that I can completely agree with. In the end sayings like "God helps those who help themselves" go in the same direction as my atheist attitude: You are responsible for yourself, don't look "up" and blame others (incl. "god"). I think the religious interpretation would be something like "since God is inside you and par of you, to look inside yourself is all it takes to see" (my own words/interpretation). I don't think the line of separation is between religion and atheism, I can find plenty of religious people I can completely agree with, the label "God" of e.g. a religious astronomer and physicist is so "meta" that it is not in the way. Even in history (of religion) I find plenty of attempts that end up in a similar place to what I as an atheist could come up with. It fits much better the way humans operate - which is a distributed network of specialized individuals. Give every individual a chance to discover their own place for themselves. This is compatible with religious views if/since they assume that "God is within you", so there is no need to look for meaning externally, just do what you have to do - which to me seems totally identical to what a real atheist would come up with. If you restrict humans from using their own judgment it's like telling the brain not to use its own judgment, which was produced based on the inputs that that specific brain collected over its lifetime. This makes sense if you think some brains are defective and need to be controlled form elsewhere. If you believe in the network (and its emergent properties incl. those of self-correction) and that 3rd party control, that does not have the same data available as the controlled brain, somehow makes better decisions (one might say: controlled economy vs. market economy is an example), than you want to let them make their own decisions. Note that this is about aggregate outcome - in either scenario there will of course be errors. The question is which is better in total, and those who ask for "freedom" should as far as I can see be in the camp of those who let individuals make decisions based on their own experiences (data). That means for a (more) optimal outcome it is better when people are able to decide for themselves what their own respective "meaning of life" is. Restricting it by setting a "global standard for all" is the opposite of freedom, and whether you are religious or not, in both cases "look within yourself!" is where it's at. One mistake often seen as the first thought when discussing the issue of no external meaning is to conclude something extremely negative, like "then I can just commit suicide". Why??? You have freedom! Yes you can conclude that - but you may equally decide that learning to play the violin and playing at concerts is your goal. It makes no logical sense to bind a negative outcome to the freedom given to the discovery that there is no external meaning. While you are alive, and you don't need to philosophize about what "alive" means", you may just as well have some fun. A note about what would happen if you actually found the "Higher purpose", e.g. if we indeed had been "created": Does that really solve anything? You only shifted the problem somewhere else. What's the purpose of that "higher power"? You can ask all those questions about the higher level just the same. A higher power solves and explains nothing.
- nothrabannosir 8y ago
  I was going to comment on this before I read your last paragraph, and I'll just pretend I didn't read it so I can pretend this was a constructive comment. > … the powers that be… This turn of phrase has a special property in my life. I have noticed that whenever someone says this, invariably the rest of the conversation will become a guilt trip without any actionable advice or concrete learnings. There will be a lot of confusion, bad feelings, and if you try to empathise, you will feel bad. But think on it as you might, for days, weeks or months: you will not find anything you learned can be used to actually change your actions or behavior. The only other phrase I know to share this property, is "let me finish". When you hear or say that, time to hit the eject button. So it is with your comment. What can I learn from this? What can I do? How can I change my way of thinking to improve this? All that happens is I feel bad. Ok: feeling bad can mean you are learning something uncomfortable. But what? I reject this idea of "powers that be." Who do you mean? Kissinger? The Koch brothers? The Clinton foundation? Soros? Xi Jinping? OPEC? The pope (which one)? Genghis Khan? "The powers that be" sounds cool because it is vague. Everyone can fill in their preferred group of bogeymen. We all have at least one. But once you start being explicit, it comes falling apart. I also reject this idea that somehow, there is an evil controlling power which can manage to steer us all in some dystopian direction of consumerism and obediance "for the sake of it". Of what? Money? For whom? Oil? Groceries? Walmart? "Big Coal"? And how? By curbing innovation society-wide, but somehow still raising the GDP? Again: start looking for specifics, and the idea begins to unravel. The world is more disjoint and segregated than this suggests. It is hard to control. There is a lot of emergent behaviour. Society evolves, and I have not seen evidence that it is not merely chaos theory at work. Our intuition for evil controlling overlords is likely to be false, based purely on the human bias for narrative. We look for narrative everywhere. For example, look at how ingrained and persistent the idea of "mother nature", and "why". "What is the point of ticks?" Nothing. They just exist. "Who designed this culture of obedience, benefiting the .01%?" Nobody, it emerged from a system of independent agents choosing what they desired most at every point in time. Look, there is probably a parallel universe somewhere where Evil Corp infuses a steady dose of consumerism and obedience in the school systems because of some imagined long term amortised benefit, through... trickle up economics?... increasing their bottom line. And I bet that loads of people did and do try to sway society in limited, concrete ways (accepting smoking, denying global warming, thinking prop comedy is funny). But I doubt that we are the subject of a massive conspiracy to influence our entire society's style of thinking about.. everything. There are too many moving parts, and too many independent actors. Most people are not evil. We just inherit it all from the previous generation, tweak some things, and pass it on. Evolution. Not intelligent design.
- tscs37 8y ago
  > you first have to create the understanding that we are not special and have no purpose. What purpose do we have? What higher being put us on this planet, deciding that we are special in this universe? Who designed the world such that we are at the center? There is simply no evidence that we have purpose. That someone made us for something special. Or that we are the center of anything. Compared to the vastness of the universe, we are utterly insignificant. The tiniest of slivers of earth is hospitable to us, go up or down by more than a few kilometers and you need machines to survive. Even Earth itself, the rock we stand on, is not hospitable to life in majority. That is not a grand conspiracy from the powers above, they are bound to the same insignificance. However bad a politician may be, how much evil they commit, does not objectively matter. The universe at large does not care. However, as Nietzsche does lay out, this does not mean there is no meaning to life or joy. Rather, the universe will not provide you with a meaning to life. Or purpose. You have to create purpose and meaning yourself. Recognize that every human on this planet must create meaning, purpose, morals, ethics and so many other things for themselves and themselves only. There is no grand truth that murder is evil, we decided murder is evil. Same for any other crime or injustice. Or immoral actions. We must decide these things are evil, in our intuitive understanding of evil. As the character Death puts it in the Discworld novels; "[...] TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED."
- bhouston 8y ago
  I find that the powers that be are not as organized as you think. Rather a lot of the metastructure in society is pretty optimal and likely converent across cultures. There is a lot of manipulation though but most of it is short term tactical towards candidates and products. Some of it is longer term and more strategically ideological but it is still pretty focused and much of it funded by billionaires - Koch, Soros types, etc. The billionaires do fight and that is why so many people pick particular ideoligcal billionaires to see as masters behind the curtains, such as Koch (coal), Adelson (Israel), Mercer (Trump, brexit) or Soros ("open society").
- watwat1 8y ago
  You’re cancer to any society.
bhouston 8y ago
This was excellent except for the last two chapters. I am pretty sure that Trump and elite oriented capitalism is much more in line with Neitzsche's views. Or did I misunderstand? EDIT: Crazy down voting in this comment thread.
- Amezarak 8y ago
  Nietzsche called industrial society the "meanest form of existence that has ever been" and claimed that socialism arose because of the vulgarity and ignobility of the capitalist elites. On several occasions he expresses a disdain for anything involving money and he considered work itself, and particularly the haste and business "capitalist elite" types have, as ugly. In general, he does not fit into modern categories of thought. The Gay Science is a great and accessible read - I recommend the Kaufmann translation, personally. It contains Nietzsche's views on a lot of subjects. I would also add that he makes clear his preferences are just that, preferences. A major point of his moral philosophy is that morality is not objective, but a social behavior, the "herd instinct in the individual."
- tscs37 8y ago
  I don't think Trump and elite-oriented capitalism as you call it, align well with Nietzsche. I don't think if Nietzsche was alive, he'd speak well of Trump either. Though it would be easy to think, the last man, as Nietzsche describes them, are people who above all want everyone in society to be happy and without pain, being equal and without hardship. The Übermensch, the opposite, is someone or a society which constantly works to learn something new, to "can do", to enrich oneself and attempt to go beyond their own limitations. I think my Ethics teacher put it "trying to interpret master/slave morality or the Übermensch as a political instrument is misguided at best, harmful at worst". Nietzsche himself, to my knowledge, has hinted at his dislike for capitalism, communism or socialism, money or work. But part of his musings are that these are merely subjective standpoints and that there is no objectively right option here. In summary, you could probably say that Nietzsche wasn't against elite-oriented capitalism in the sense that he did not reject it as viewpoint, it's subjective so it's a correct option.
- jstewartmobile 8y ago
peter_retief 8y ago
The pragmatic views of Trump are more in line with Nietzsche's philosophy. There is a very small elite group that create wealth. Taxing the successful and giving out free stuff for votes seems to be the default position of the intelligentsia of the age. Nice read though, well constructed
- nickthemagicman 8y ago
  That's false. Wealth is created by needs of the market that's why markets with strong middle class do so well. Any random rich person can fill those needs. It's not some brilliant vision they have. As a matter of fact most new tech wealth... Google Uber Facebook Apple Microsoft... all of their founders came from the middle class. If your idea was true then 3rd world countries where the rich have vast wealth and cheap resources would have the best economies. Your armchair supply side trickle down economic theory doesn't hold up. You should question what you hear on conservative news outlets.
  - bhouston 8y ago
    He is arguing that Nietzsche`s ideas seem to be more like Trumps than otherwise. It doesn`t mean that Trump is right.
  - hydrox24 8y ago
    I don't know that it's fair to simply say his statement is false. The problem with your reductio ad absurdum is that the rich in such countries do not create wealth. Their economies are aptly described as crony-capitalism for this reason. It's a redistribution of sovereign wealth (resources) rather than the creation of wealth. Your argument more broadly is that wealth is created by the needs of the market. But I think that you cannot ascribe it to any particular one of the things you listed. Regardless of who determines those needs, someone also needs to fulfill such needs. On top of someone to fulfill the needs, you need capital to fund the venture too. Thus, you end up with a small number of very rich people who use their capital to fuel wealth creation. I don't know that the full thrust of the parent is correct, but he's not totally wrong either. You may need a middle class, but you need the other classes, however transient, as well.
davidpaulyoung 8y ago
Before ingesting Nietzsche, please first understand Plato.
- virmundi 8y ago
  Why? Nietzsche gets it right, assuming there is no God. There is no objective morality. There are no forms. The world is entirely material and all things are subjective. Even the uberman is just a subjective fantasy that Nietzche told himself to find meaning in a meaningless reality.
  - yonoataraxia 8y ago
    Thus Spoke davidpaulyoung, that's why. Sorry, couldn't resist a good joke. I'm just a mere mortal (although I like ancient philosophy).
  - theothermkn 8y ago
    I’m going to chime in to this very rote and dreary conversation only long enough to point out that, even in the unlikely event that “objective morality” is anything more coherent than “nuance makes me uncomfortable,” the existence or absence of “God” does not impinge on its existence. This is one of the more damning things about that whole “conversation”; the psychological need for a moral order is so great that the justification used for it is an utterly unquestioned, utterly absurd non sequitur. I’ve just said the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard on the topic, and I’m still bored with it.
    - yonoataraxia 8y ago
      > I’ve just said the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard on the topic, and I’m still bored with it. Thanks, I chuckled. It's true that the conversation contains a big amount of things that are obvious and trivial as soon as somebody understands them. Maybe you could make it more interesting if you start to question your own existence, but it's definitely possible that you don't have the problems that most people have with this topic. In this case you found a shortcut to enlightenment. Congratulations! (this is no sarcasm. I like how you interact with those ideas and still believe they're boring af).
dnomad 8y ago
Leiter tends to take Nietzsche very literally. Yes, Nietzsche grasped quite clearly that exceedingly few people have the courage to endure the world "in itself." Most people persist their whole lives trapped in elaborate fantasies. This is something that, Nietszche suspects, has been true since the dawn of time and recognizes it as an essential human characteristic (herd instinct). Science causes a kind of crisis. ("God is dead.") After millenia of extreme devotion to all manner nonsense (think of the religious wars that plagued Europe) science starts asking some very uncomfortable and very pointed questions. But people will not abandon their fantasies, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Instead they will cling to their fantasies that much harder often with full knowledge that what they "believe" are lies. This metastasizes into fascism [1]. When Trump says climate change is a Chinese hoax he knows he's lying, and you know he's lying, and accusing him of lying would be pointless and that's the point. Nietzsche foresaw quite clearly that this would be the crisis of the 20th century and beyong: in the face of science people would become more willing to deceive themselves. What Nietzsche proposes against this isn't some tired paean to "human excellence." Leiter here gets very literal and selective here. Nietzsche does not think that art or philosophy or dance can stand against the ever rising tide of fascism. It is what motivates these things -- the will to power -- that is the only defense against self-deception. All fantasies are born of fear, a fear of change and growth and death. But there also exists in some men a desire for change and growth and death. (Indeed Nietzsche will come to believe that the will to power is a kind of cosmic necessity.) The only hope that societies have against falling to fascism is cultivating precisely this opposing force which Nietzsche understands not as some mere "will to truth" or "will to excellence" but a far more primal "will to power" that motivates men to plunge into the unknown and confront their own mortality. [1] "In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
ThJ 8y ago
My takeaway from witnessing countless arguments about Nietzsche: Nietzsche wasn't very good at expressing what he meant. If he were, there wouldn't be so much arguing about how to interpret his works.
- platz 8y ago
  That's ok, he wasn't writing to be understood by everyone! among scholars there is much agreement about what nietzsche meant of what he wrote.
- bsenftner 8y ago
  I always felt he was extremely articulate, and it is the typical readers preconceived filters preventing them from understanding Nietzsche sentence by sentence. I have sat down with an unbelievably large number of people studying Nietzsche, as I was a teaching assistant for an undergraduate class on his work. Time and time again, I would be pointing out the basic, fundamental misunderstandings; The world view of the typical American Christian cloud their ability to think clearly about the basic nature of Nietzsche's perspective. They literally can't think logically straight, and bend meaning word by word with personal emotional criticism interlaced with "fear for their soul". They are intellectually handicapped, their thoughts are so interlaced with variations of fear.
  - yonoataraxia 8y ago
    I think it's ok. When they would instantly understand Nietzsche, it's very likely they already had major depressive episodes in their lives. Otherwise it's difficult to question everything you thought you knew about anything. Normally it's not a pleasant experience. That is the reason that so-called enlightenment happens only to those who had big inner struggles after many years of reflection. In a Freudian way their unconscious side protects them from threats attacking their mental health. Knowing what's right and wrong is necessary to do anything with reason. If you accept the fact that there is no right and wrong, you can definitely lose some motivation which is detrimental to the incentive system that our consciousness gets trained with. It's therefore rational for most people to reject those ideas (although they don't necessarily can reflect on this level). I wouldn't call it "intellectually handicapped", I would say their mental processes protect them very well from thoughts that could lead to a loss of their values and belief system. Otherwise it sounds so negative although it's a rational thing to do for the consciousness. Normally your incentive system is not "I want to know the whole damn truth", it's "I want a happy and fulfilled life, want to feel good about myself and achieve something". Cognitive biases help us to achieve those goals. It just seems irrational from external point of views because of missing profundity in the analysis of the psyche of the other person. They're perfectly logical w.r.t. the incentive system.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Negative1 8y ago
Enjoyable read but quite the dire ending. Of course that's the point; this essay wasn't meant to bring you happiness.
zkomp 8y ago
Nice to see a good reading of Nietzsche, which is super hard given his style and your own bias. I agree with this, and it really puts the focus on why it is rewarding reading Nietzsche today. The only thing I miss is the implicit and hidden Spinozism in Nietzsche. Why it matters? - Spinoza can really help with the political aspect. Goal of true democracy and maximum freedom. Such a reading will see The will to Power as the Spinozian conatus/desire. As for Power, not opressive power of rulers, but the power to live and act. The affirmation as Spinozian affirmation of joy (ie affirmate what makes you grow in such power)

109 points by secondary 8y ago

What actually is happening is people being indoctrinated with a view of themselves and the world as being animals spinning around a rock with no purpose and no meaning. This is how the powers that be wants us to feel, and it's the point of going through the education system, shaping us into specialized workers, with relief coming from consuming things. It seems very few people realize what is going on. It's no accident the world was told to be round in the 1500s, because in order to make people believe we are pointless small little hairy apes, you first have to create the understanding that we are not special and have no purpose. Let the downvoting begin :) Hacker news readers are usually unable to even consider things like what I said. It's natural to assume people like me are just dumb, but reality is not that easy.

Drakim 8y ago
It's so much easier to imagine that there is a grand, fantastic, and amazing conspiracy, and that ultimately when the curtain is pulled down it will all make sense and the truth will be clear. No more confusion, no more enfeebled helplessness, no more spinning around in a universe where directions are meaningless. The evil will be pushed back and things will go back to how they ought to be, in perfect harmony. By romanticizing the world this way, it all becomes so much easier, it's an easier pill to swallow because it's a bitter taste that we are familiar with. And there is an allure of sweetness behind the taste, the idea that ultimately there is an inherent wonderful good truth waiting, just around the corner. But it's ultimately an illusion, there is no grand conspiracy, and when there carpet comes down we find only empty space behind it. It can be both terrifying and liberating to accept that.
- some_account 8y ago
  No no, this is not some romanticizing fantasy image that I dreamt up after a couple of glasses of wine one night :) I'm a hard-core geek, programmer, tinkerer since I got my first computer in 1985 or so. I'm working as a data engineer and cloud architect currently. My IQ is fine and I dont believe in fairies :) All I did was research the history of our societies. Who controls what, who benefits from what, stuff like that. And there is actually a big conspiracy going on when it comes to our world view and our place in this world. There are sites purely set up for propaganda, like flat earth society, who explains gravity with "yeah so the world is currently traveling upwards at a constant rate, and that is gravity"... Lol :) Nobody actually believes that. It's just to turn people off from the idea, and it's working. It's been the Google number one hit since like forever, and it's designed that way :) All this makes sense if you understand what the purpose is, but people usually spend like 10 minutes, go to the wrong sites, and laugh it off :) Go to Eric dubays videos on YouTube, go through the ones where he goes through how things are working according to flat earth theories. Its highly interesting. There see more than one way to explain what we see.
  - wruza 8y ago
    Given how much effort you have to put into a local progress and how many ‘energy’ and knowledge is lost on progress that crosses the company/group/area/country boundary, it is a very small femtochance that any worldwide conspiracy exists. Obviously, the capital and power has to be accumulated in relatively few hands, but it seems too doubtful that at least one of our species is capable of managing and routing that in the way you describe. It may appear as such to some idiots with megatons of money and clear minds behind them, so they form their elite clubs, but no more than that. Anyone who did something complex should have seen that clearly. We as a whole civilization are just an uncontrollable mess.
    - andai 8y ago
      To clarify, are you saying there is an illuminati, but they really suck at their job?
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    That guy is just babbling incoherently. Like, he thinks that summer happens at the same time across most of the planet and that the fake science explains seasons with the elliptical orbit of the earth (this is commonly noted as a misconception¹). Please stop spouting this nonsense here. 1. https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/seasons-causes.html https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/seasons-causes.html
- AmericanChopper 8y ago
  This is really only one possible interpretation of the absurd. The collective absurdist philosophers all tended to agree that when confronted with the apparent meaninglessness of life there were 3 general responses possible. 1. Suicide (not widely advocated for in philosophy circles) 2. A leap of faith (essentially to impart your own meaning to life) 3. Embrace of the meaninglessness It seems to me like you may be advocating for the 3rd option? Logically speaking, it’s equally as valid as the other two, but it does have one major shortcoming in that it doesn’t naturally lead to any conclusions. Personally I see more value in the 2nd option, but it does come with the added baggage of settling on or coming up with your own values system.
  - Drakim 8y ago
    Taking a leap of faith option is probably the most common and orthodox solution. While religious themes comes to mind, it's not really limited to religion, tons of people find non-religious causes and beliefs to hold onto, like humanism, skepticism, trans-humanism, social justice, or other variants. Common to all of these is a specific narrative, a foundational belief that deep down, once you wash away the topsoil, it all makes sense, that there is an unshakeable and unmovable bedrock waiting. Sure, there is sand and water shaking our feet today, but deep below awaits solidity and surety. That ultimately, Truth is our steadfast ally. And that the only real way to find meaning and sanity is to root yourself to that bedrock. But what happens that day when we dig down and find nothing? When we realize that we are floating aimlessly in space towards nowhere, untethered from all meaning? If we have tied all our worth, thoughts, and values to that imaginary rock then we'll have nothing left.
    - AmericanChopper 8y ago
      I agree that the leap of faith is the most common way people choose to live. But you seem to be describing it from a perspective of somebody who’s never asked themselves the question, or who gave up trying to answer it. To properly arrive at the leap of faith, you need to first accept that there are no universal truths. Then you can choose some axioms to base meaning on, and build outwards from there. I don’t believe that this approach is truly that orthodox, even if it may arrive at a similar destination to not asking the question to begin with. There is no universal truth anywhere in life. Even empiricism is based on our subjective experiences, and rationalism is also flawed in exactly the same way. Life itself doesn’t offer any bedrock of truth, but that doesn’t mean truth doesn’t exist. You can take the leap of faith and create your own truth in life.
slededit 8y ago
> It's no accident the world was told to be round in the 1500s I'm actually confused about two things: First are you implying the world is flat or some other theory? Secondly, Why does a round earth imply we are insignificant. It seems the shape of a rock in space is irrelevant to our importance.
bitexploder 8y ago
Please drop the hyperbole of your last three sentences. HNers are smart enough to read your words without a classic "but you won't listen anyway". It adds nothing. Now then. This question of purpose is the same now as it was for the ancient Greeks 2000+ years ago. Not a lot has changed about the human condition, even in the modern age of consumerism. I would implore you to look at how the ancient philosophers viewed their world. This rant could have been written by one of them.
MadSudaca 8y ago
> It's natural to assume people like me are just dumb, but reality is not that easy. How do you know yourself that you're not dumb?
- some_account 8y ago
  I imagine if I was dumb, I would have trouble learning new things and be more interested in having education tell me what the truth is. Then I could just relax, knowing I know the truth since they told me. :) Would be an easy life!
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
h0l0cube 8y ago
Heliocentrism along with 'roundness' of the earth was first hypothesized ~300bc by Aristarchus [1], and the circumference of the earth was first estimated some time later by Eratosthenes [2]. The scientific inquiry and its attack on religion unsurprisingly seems to align itself with the intellectual strides of humanity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_of_Samos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_of_Samos [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
ItsMe000001 8y ago
But nothing is meaningless. Everything has exactly the meaning the individual asking the question decides it has. It is your freedom as well as responsibility. As an atheist I actually read the thoughts of some church intellectuals, for example once something from some bishop in the Vatican, that I can completely agree with. In the end sayings like "God helps those who help themselves" go in the same direction as my atheist attitude: You are responsible for yourself, don't look "up" and blame others (incl. "god"). I think the religious interpretation would be something like "since God is inside you and par of you, to look inside yourself is all it takes to see" (my own words/interpretation). I don't think the line of separation is between religion and atheism, I can find plenty of religious people I can completely agree with, the label "God" of e.g. a religious astronomer and physicist is so "meta" that it is not in the way. Even in history (of religion) I find plenty of attempts that end up in a similar place to what I as an atheist could come up with. It fits much better the way humans operate - which is a distributed network of specialized individuals. Give every individual a chance to discover their own place for themselves. This is compatible with religious views if/since they assume that "God is within you", so there is no need to look for meaning externally, just do what you have to do - which to me seems totally identical to what a real atheist would come up with. If you restrict humans from using their own judgment it's like telling the brain not to use its own judgment, which was produced based on the inputs that that specific brain collected over its lifetime. This makes sense if you think some brains are defective and need to be controlled form elsewhere. If you believe in the network (and its emergent properties incl. those of self-correction) and that 3rd party control, that does not have the same data available as the controlled brain, somehow makes better decisions (one might say: controlled economy vs. market economy is an example), than you want to let them make their own decisions. Note that this is about aggregate outcome - in either scenario there will of course be errors. The question is which is better in total, and those who ask for "freedom" should as far as I can see be in the camp of those who let individuals make decisions based on their own experiences (data). That means for a (more) optimal outcome it is better when people are able to decide for themselves what their own respective "meaning of life" is. Restricting it by setting a "global standard for all" is the opposite of freedom, and whether you are religious or not, in both cases "look within yourself!" is where it's at. One mistake often seen as the first thought when discussing the issue of no external meaning is to conclude something extremely negative, like "then I can just commit suicide". Why??? You have freedom! Yes you can conclude that - but you may equally decide that learning to play the violin and playing at concerts is your goal. It makes no logical sense to bind a negative outcome to the freedom given to the discovery that there is no external meaning. While you are alive, and you don't need to philosophize about what "alive" means", you may just as well have some fun. A note about what would happen if you actually found the "Higher purpose", e.g. if we indeed had been "created": Does that really solve anything? You only shifted the problem somewhere else. What's the purpose of that "higher power"? You can ask all those questions about the higher level just the same. A higher power solves and explains nothing.
nothrabannosir 8y ago
I was going to comment on this before I read your last paragraph, and I'll just pretend I didn't read it so I can pretend this was a constructive comment. > … the powers that be… This turn of phrase has a special property in my life. I have noticed that whenever someone says this, invariably the rest of the conversation will become a guilt trip without any actionable advice or concrete learnings. There will be a lot of confusion, bad feelings, and if you try to empathise, you will feel bad. But think on it as you might, for days, weeks or months: you will not find anything you learned can be used to actually change your actions or behavior. The only other phrase I know to share this property, is "let me finish". When you hear or say that, time to hit the eject button. So it is with your comment. What can I learn from this? What can I do? How can I change my way of thinking to improve this? All that happens is I feel bad. Ok: feeling bad can mean you are learning something uncomfortable. But what? I reject this idea of "powers that be." Who do you mean? Kissinger? The Koch brothers? The Clinton foundation? Soros? Xi Jinping? OPEC? The pope (which one)? Genghis Khan? "The powers that be" sounds cool because it is vague. Everyone can fill in their preferred group of bogeymen. We all have at least one. But once you start being explicit, it comes falling apart. I also reject this idea that somehow, there is an evil controlling power which can manage to steer us all in some dystopian direction of consumerism and obediance "for the sake of it". Of what? Money? For whom? Oil? Groceries? Walmart? "Big Coal"? And how? By curbing innovation society-wide, but somehow still raising the GDP? Again: start looking for specifics, and the idea begins to unravel. The world is more disjoint and segregated than this suggests. It is hard to control. There is a lot of emergent behaviour. Society evolves, and I have not seen evidence that it is not merely chaos theory at work. Our intuition for evil controlling overlords is likely to be false, based purely on the human bias for narrative. We look for narrative everywhere. For example, look at how ingrained and persistent the idea of "mother nature", and "why". "What is the point of ticks?" Nothing. They just exist. "Who designed this culture of obedience, benefiting the .01%?" Nobody, it emerged from a system of independent agents choosing what they desired most at every point in time. Look, there is probably a parallel universe somewhere where Evil Corp infuses a steady dose of consumerism and obedience in the school systems because of some imagined long term amortised benefit, through... trickle up economics?... increasing their bottom line. And I bet that loads of people did and do try to sway society in limited, concrete ways (accepting smoking, denying global warming, thinking prop comedy is funny). But I doubt that we are the subject of a massive conspiracy to influence our entire society's style of thinking about.. everything. There are too many moving parts, and too many independent actors. Most people are not evil. We just inherit it all from the previous generation, tweak some things, and pass it on. Evolution. Not intelligent design.
tscs37 8y ago
> you first have to create the understanding that we are not special and have no purpose. What purpose do we have? What higher being put us on this planet, deciding that we are special in this universe? Who designed the world such that we are at the center? There is simply no evidence that we have purpose. That someone made us for something special. Or that we are the center of anything. Compared to the vastness of the universe, we are utterly insignificant. The tiniest of slivers of earth is hospitable to us, go up or down by more than a few kilometers and you need machines to survive. Even Earth itself, the rock we stand on, is not hospitable to life in majority. That is not a grand conspiracy from the powers above, they are bound to the same insignificance. However bad a politician may be, how much evil they commit, does not objectively matter. The universe at large does not care. However, as Nietzsche does lay out, this does not mean there is no meaning to life or joy. Rather, the universe will not provide you with a meaning to life. Or purpose. You have to create purpose and meaning yourself. Recognize that every human on this planet must create meaning, purpose, morals, ethics and so many other things for themselves and themselves only. There is no grand truth that murder is evil, we decided murder is evil. Same for any other crime or injustice. Or immoral actions. We must decide these things are evil, in our intuitive understanding of evil. As the character Death puts it in the Discworld novels; "[...] TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED."
bhouston 8y ago
I find that the powers that be are not as organized as you think. Rather a lot of the metastructure in society is pretty optimal and likely converent across cultures. There is a lot of manipulation though but most of it is short term tactical towards candidates and products. Some of it is longer term and more strategically ideological but it is still pretty focused and much of it funded by billionaires - Koch, Soros types, etc. The billionaires do fight and that is why so many people pick particular ideoligcal billionaires to see as masters behind the curtains, such as Koch (coal), Adelson (Israel), Mercer (Trump, brexit) or Soros ("open society").
watwat1 8y ago
You’re cancer to any society.

bhouston 8y ago

This was excellent except for the last two chapters. I am pretty sure that Trump and elite oriented capitalism is much more in line with Neitzsche's views. Or did I misunderstand? EDIT: Crazy down voting in this comment thread.

Amezarak 8y ago
Nietzsche called industrial society the "meanest form of existence that has ever been" and claimed that socialism arose because of the vulgarity and ignobility of the capitalist elites. On several occasions he expresses a disdain for anything involving money and he considered work itself, and particularly the haste and business "capitalist elite" types have, as ugly. In general, he does not fit into modern categories of thought. The Gay Science is a great and accessible read - I recommend the Kaufmann translation, personally. It contains Nietzsche's views on a lot of subjects. I would also add that he makes clear his preferences are just that, preferences. A major point of his moral philosophy is that morality is not objective, but a social behavior, the "herd instinct in the individual."
tscs37 8y ago
I don't think Trump and elite-oriented capitalism as you call it, align well with Nietzsche. I don't think if Nietzsche was alive, he'd speak well of Trump either. Though it would be easy to think, the last man, as Nietzsche describes them, are people who above all want everyone in society to be happy and without pain, being equal and without hardship. The Übermensch, the opposite, is someone or a society which constantly works to learn something new, to "can do", to enrich oneself and attempt to go beyond their own limitations. I think my Ethics teacher put it "trying to interpret master/slave morality or the Übermensch as a political instrument is misguided at best, harmful at worst". Nietzsche himself, to my knowledge, has hinted at his dislike for capitalism, communism or socialism, money or work. But part of his musings are that these are merely subjective standpoints and that there is no objectively right option here. In summary, you could probably say that Nietzsche wasn't against elite-oriented capitalism in the sense that he did not reject it as viewpoint, it's subjective so it's a correct option.
jstewartmobile 8y ago

peter_retief 8y ago

The pragmatic views of Trump are more in line with Nietzsche's philosophy. There is a very small elite group that create wealth. Taxing the successful and giving out free stuff for votes seems to be the default position of the intelligentsia of the age. Nice read though, well constructed

nickthemagicman 8y ago
That's false. Wealth is created by needs of the market that's why markets with strong middle class do so well. Any random rich person can fill those needs. It's not some brilliant vision they have. As a matter of fact most new tech wealth... Google Uber Facebook Apple Microsoft... all of their founders came from the middle class. If your idea was true then 3rd world countries where the rich have vast wealth and cheap resources would have the best economies. Your armchair supply side trickle down economic theory doesn't hold up. You should question what you hear on conservative news outlets.
- bhouston 8y ago
  He is arguing that Nietzsche`s ideas seem to be more like Trumps than otherwise. It doesn`t mean that Trump is right.
- hydrox24 8y ago
  I don't know that it's fair to simply say his statement is false. The problem with your reductio ad absurdum is that the rich in such countries do not create wealth. Their economies are aptly described as crony-capitalism for this reason. It's a redistribution of sovereign wealth (resources) rather than the creation of wealth. Your argument more broadly is that wealth is created by the needs of the market. But I think that you cannot ascribe it to any particular one of the things you listed. Regardless of who determines those needs, someone also needs to fulfill such needs. On top of someone to fulfill the needs, you need capital to fund the venture too. Thus, you end up with a small number of very rich people who use their capital to fuel wealth creation. I don't know that the full thrust of the parent is correct, but he's not totally wrong either. You may need a middle class, but you need the other classes, however transient, as well.

davidpaulyoung 8y ago

Before ingesting Nietzsche, please first understand Plato.

virmundi 8y ago
Why? Nietzsche gets it right, assuming there is no God. There is no objective morality. There are no forms. The world is entirely material and all things are subjective. Even the uberman is just a subjective fantasy that Nietzche told himself to find meaning in a meaningless reality.
- yonoataraxia 8y ago
  Thus Spoke davidpaulyoung, that's why. Sorry, couldn't resist a good joke. I'm just a mere mortal (although I like ancient philosophy).
- theothermkn 8y ago
  I’m going to chime in to this very rote and dreary conversation only long enough to point out that, even in the unlikely event that “objective morality” is anything more coherent than “nuance makes me uncomfortable,” the existence or absence of “God” does not impinge on its existence. This is one of the more damning things about that whole “conversation”; the psychological need for a moral order is so great that the justification used for it is an utterly unquestioned, utterly absurd non sequitur. I’ve just said the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard on the topic, and I’m still bored with it.
  - yonoataraxia 8y ago
    > I’ve just said the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard on the topic, and I’m still bored with it. Thanks, I chuckled. It's true that the conversation contains a big amount of things that are obvious and trivial as soon as somebody understands them. Maybe you could make it more interesting if you start to question your own existence, but it's definitely possible that you don't have the problems that most people have with this topic. In this case you found a shortcut to enlightenment. Congratulations! (this is no sarcasm. I like how you interact with those ideas and still believe they're boring af).

dnomad 8y ago

Leiter tends to take Nietzsche very literally. Yes, Nietzsche grasped quite clearly that exceedingly few people have the courage to endure the world "in itself." Most people persist their whole lives trapped in elaborate fantasies. This is something that, Nietszche suspects, has been true since the dawn of time and recognizes it as an essential human characteristic (herd instinct). Science causes a kind of crisis. ("God is dead.") After millenia of extreme devotion to all manner nonsense (think of the religious wars that plagued Europe) science starts asking some very uncomfortable and very pointed questions. But people will not abandon their fantasies, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Instead they will cling to their fantasies that much harder often with full knowledge that what they "believe" are lies. This metastasizes into fascism [1]. When Trump says climate change is a Chinese hoax he knows he's lying, and you know he's lying, and accusing him of lying would be pointless and that's the point. Nietzsche foresaw quite clearly that this would be the crisis of the 20th century and beyong: in the face of science people would become more willing to deceive themselves. What Nietzsche proposes against this isn't some tired paean to "human excellence." Leiter here gets very literal and selective here. Nietzsche does not think that art or philosophy or dance can stand against the ever rising tide of fascism. It is what motivates these things -- the will to power -- that is the only defense against self-deception. All fantasies are born of fear, a fear of change and growth and death. But there also exists in some men a desire for change and growth and death. (Indeed Nietzsche will come to believe that the will to power is a kind of cosmic necessity.) The only hope that societies have against falling to fascism is cultivating precisely this opposing force which Nietzsche understands not as some mere "will to truth" or "will to excellence" but a far more primal "will to power" that motivates men to plunge into the unknown and confront their own mortality. [1] "In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

ThJ 8y ago

My takeaway from witnessing countless arguments about Nietzsche: Nietzsche wasn't very good at expressing what he meant. If he were, there wouldn't be so much arguing about how to interpret his works.

platz 8y ago
That's ok, he wasn't writing to be understood by everyone! among scholars there is much agreement about what nietzsche meant of what he wrote.
bsenftner 8y ago
I always felt he was extremely articulate, and it is the typical readers preconceived filters preventing them from understanding Nietzsche sentence by sentence. I have sat down with an unbelievably large number of people studying Nietzsche, as I was a teaching assistant for an undergraduate class on his work. Time and time again, I would be pointing out the basic, fundamental misunderstandings; The world view of the typical American Christian cloud their ability to think clearly about the basic nature of Nietzsche's perspective. They literally can't think logically straight, and bend meaning word by word with personal emotional criticism interlaced with "fear for their soul". They are intellectually handicapped, their thoughts are so interlaced with variations of fear.
- yonoataraxia 8y ago
  I think it's ok. When they would instantly understand Nietzsche, it's very likely they already had major depressive episodes in their lives. Otherwise it's difficult to question everything you thought you knew about anything. Normally it's not a pleasant experience. That is the reason that so-called enlightenment happens only to those who had big inner struggles after many years of reflection. In a Freudian way their unconscious side protects them from threats attacking their mental health. Knowing what's right and wrong is necessary to do anything with reason. If you accept the fact that there is no right and wrong, you can definitely lose some motivation which is detrimental to the incentive system that our consciousness gets trained with. It's therefore rational for most people to reject those ideas (although they don't necessarily can reflect on this level). I wouldn't call it "intellectually handicapped", I would say their mental processes protect them very well from thoughts that could lead to a loss of their values and belief system. Otherwise it sounds so negative although it's a rational thing to do for the consciousness. Normally your incentive system is not "I want to know the whole damn truth", it's "I want a happy and fulfilled life, want to feel good about myself and achieve something". Cognitive biases help us to achieve those goals. It just seems irrational from external point of views because of missing profundity in the analysis of the psyche of the other person. They're perfectly logical w.r.t. the incentive system.

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Negative1 8y ago

Enjoyable read but quite the dire ending. Of course that's the point; this essay wasn't meant to bring you happiness.

zkomp 8y ago

Nice to see a good reading of Nietzsche, which is super hard given his style and your own bias. I agree with this, and it really puts the focus on why it is rewarding reading Nietzsche today. The only thing I miss is the implicit and hidden Spinozism in Nietzsche. Why it matters? - Spinoza can really help with the political aspect. Goal of true democracy and maximum freedom. Such a reading will see The will to Power as the Spinozian conatus/desire. As for Power, not opressive power of rulers, but the power to live and act. The affirmation as Spinozian affirmation of joy (ie affirmate what makes you grow in such power)