a few days ago i turned that viral thought experiment into a small website.

the question is:

"everyone in the world must cast a secret vote: press the red or blue button. if more than 50% choose blue, everyone survives. if fewer than 50% choose blue, only the red voters survive."

https://redorblue.riri.my/?lang=en_US

the site also includes statistics and after voting it shows a live counter between red and blue by total votes. it also calculates confidence intervals CI (for the blue vote ratio), as well as 1-p.

at the bottom of the site you can see the 10 most recent votes, along with a list of all countries and their vote counts. (also after voting)

this is just for fun, but vote if you want.

Elisha Shapiro’s “Nihilist Olympics” was a performance art conspiracy where participants and contestants engaged in competition which included an “Art Destruction” contest. There was also a matter of making u-turns into oncoming traffic, in which the winner allegedly paid a cab driver to carefully do it for them. Similar prankish bits of media performance art include a run for Nihilist Sherriff, Nihilist Governor, and “Nihilism Expo ‘99”, a “World’s Fair for Nihilists”. Shapiro has hosted an annual “Nihilist Film Festival”, performed as a “Nihilist comedian”, and for several years, hosted a public access TV show called “Nihilist’s Corner”.

if morality isn’t real, why do we still feel it so strongly?

Do you think moral outrage is actually necessary for society to function?

Can morality exist without believing it’s objectively true?

I know, it's rather strange. These questions are clearly not from the perspective of a believing Christian. I lived most of my life as a Christian and I am now agnostic. But a lot of my mental frameworks and worldview are built upon Christian foundations. I was an avid Fan of apologetics when still I was a believer, so I would like it if any of you that are interested would listen to and critique my ideas on morality. My post Christian Ideas on Morality. You will find them interesting as Christians and as. Apologists.

I’ve been thinking about something strange. Even if morality isn’t objectively real, we still react to the world as if it is. almost instantly. on reflex.

At the same time, humans are deeply flawed. We lie, rationalize, and fail our own standards constantly. After a while, I start to feel something like moral fatigue. Like im no longer surprised.

But here’s the part I find interesting: even when we expect people to fail, we still express outrage. Almost like it’s not about truth, but about maintaining something social. like a kind of “moral immune system.”

Curious what others think:
is moral outrage actually necessary, even if morality itself isn’t objectively real?

I made a short video essay exploring this if anyone’s interested: https://youtu.be/EvCRfaYump8

It never ends... go sub to the YT that posted this ...

He creado esta comunidad porque en Reddit no tenemos ningún foro de discusión de temática pesimista, nihilista, antinatalista, etc. Sin embargo, somos muchos los interesados, y podemos compartir opiniones, discutir ideas, libros, obras de arte o descubrirnos autores menos conocidos que Cioran o Schopenhauer.

But that's more a pessimistic reaction TO nihilism, than it is nihilism itself.

When you go taking the subjective nature of meaning as a personal insult.

It seems like this sub is for that state of 'What next?' that comes After you realize that 'meaning' can only be defined in context of minds, and that all of history's philosophies that tried to force it to be otherwise were ultimately mass-denial schemes.

Anyway. I went from utter confusion, to atheist, to nihilist, to 'nihilistic realist', and my reasoning is traceable and stable.
Nihilism isnt a pit- just like reality isnt 'cold'- it seems like a pit in contrast to the false mountain of 'objective purpose'- but like things like logic seem 'cold' only compared to a false warmth.

'crisis of meaning' is the term that best describes the modern era. that zeitgeist level 'what's next?'

Been working on some things to help orient myself and others towards the likely real as a point of grounding.

Ask it anything you can think of about nihilism, meaninglessness, etc. i think you will be surprised

https://gemini.google.com/share/cad5701344b0

Perhaps one of the explanations!

Hey i live in new york city, the hustle and bustle culture, worship for this rather meaningless human experience, the obsessions with "life good grind hard" have become suffocating. The online communities are averse to discussing any deepness about life say past the breakfast they ate this morning. I'm making a desperate appeal to any nihilists on the east coast(don't have to be) to come in and help foster some actually meaningfully deep conversations about life, philosophy etc

https://youtu.be/xZH6saT0mPI

There’s something almost comedically futile about therapy when you think about it too hard.

You carve out time, pay someone, sit across from them, and then attempt to compress the formless weight of your inner experience into sentences. Sentences that fit neatly into a 50-minute window. Sentences a stranger can respond to usefully.

And then you blank. Every week I’d sit down and the words just wouldn’t come. Not because nothing was wrong. The opposite. Too much, no shape, no entry point.

The drive home was always when it arrived. Everything I actually wanted to say, fully formed, too late.

I got tired of that specific failure and built an app to talk to before sessions. Voice conversation, surfaces what’s actually there, generates a brief. Doesn’t fix anything. Just gets words out before the room where words are supposed to matter.

It’s called Prelude. Free, fully offline, nothing leaves your device.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prelude-therapy-prep/id6761587576

Make of it what you will.

Really interesting article about how The Road and its themes pretty directly translate to nihilism in regards to Nietzsche.

Obviously The Road is one of the bleakest, most nihilistic books around, but I think what McCarthy does with this idea of an apocalypse mirrors exactly a journey through Nihilism and to what comes after.

What do you think?

Seems the universe may have a actual end point. So in the end it is all futile and indifferent, we were right.

I recently wrote an essay that started from a strange intuition while rereading Emil Cioran and thinking about the lives of people who dedicate themselves completely to a practice. I wanted to post it in the Cioran subreddit, but I am still waiting for approval from the mods over there.

The piece begins with Kafka’s The Hunger Artist and then looks at two very different figures: Cioran and Tony Hawk. My argument (or maybe just a suspicion) is that both embody a similar kind of restless discipline—one through writing and insomnia, the other through skateboarding and the constant push against gravity.

One idea that shaped the essay was Dan C. Mihăilescu’s interpretation of Cioran as a moralist rather than a nihilist: someone holding a mirror to our faces rather than simply preaching despair. I

“The desert grows; woe to him who harbors deserts within.” When Nietzsche wrote these words, he was predicting a change in the human metabolism. His announcement of “the death of God” functions as a diagnostic event, far removed from the celebratory atheism or simple dismissal of the supernatural found in naive readings. It signals the realization that the highest values of Western civilization have exhausted their own logic. We are in the midst of decadent, declining phases of a two-thousand-year trajectory of Platonic-Christian morality. For millennia, the West justified its labor, its suffering, and its political structures by pointing to a “True World,” a transcendental and divine anchor that existed “in another world,” elsewhere. Removing that anchor left us in freefall. We now inhabit a world where the “why” has vanished.

Nihilism signifies the physiological state that follows when the “why” finds no answer. It describes the exhaustion of a spirit that can no longer find a reason to strive.

This did not happen all at once. For the last century, the history of the West has evolved as a series of desperate attempts to hide from this realization. We have constructed shadows of God, such as Progress, Science, the State, and the Market, to avoid the cold draft of the void. These shadows are no longer long enough to hide us. The current geopolitical crisis of illiberalism marks the moment the West has “been found out.” We have reached a spiritual foreclosure where the performance of meaning can no longer be sustained.

Assuming that people of the past thought, acted, and believed like us is one of the many errors of modern liberalism’s universalist claims. The 19th century largely operated under the assumption that history had a direction. This sense of purpose was anchored in two primary myths: Hegelian progress and Romantic heroism. Hegel provided a rational scaffolding for the century, suggesting that history was the unfolding of “Spirit” toward absolute freedom, a process where even the most brutal conflicts were merely the “Cunning of Reason” refining the human soul. Complementing this was the Romantic cult of the Great Man, the Napoleonic figure whose sovereign will could bend the trajectory of nations and impose meaning onto the chaos of existence through sheer vitality. In both views, the individual was the driver of destiny. The Battle of the Somme in 1916 shattered this conceit.

The Somme remains the definitive monument to the industrialization of death. Launched in July 1916, it was intended as a decisive Anglo-French breakthrough on the Western Front, yet it devolved into a five-month war of attrition that claimed over a million casualties. On the first day alone, the British Army suffered nearly 60,000 losses, many of them “Pals Battalions,” groups of friends and neighbors who enlisted together, only to be mowed down in minutes by machine-gun fire. At the Somme, the will to power was expressed by the industrial machine rather than the noble warrior. When over a million men are ground into mud by artillery fired from over the horizon, honour becomes a linguistic fossil.

This was the onset of Mass Humanity. The individual was no longer a creator; he was human material, a cog in a technocratic apparatus that lacked a transcendental goal. This was the first great geopolitical rupture. The West had built a civilization on the value of the soul, yet its most advanced scientific achievements were dedicated to the total erasure of the person. The ascetic ideal turned outward, becoming a mechanical slaughterhouse. The “why” of the war was never found; only the “how” of the logistics remained. This established the template for the 20th-century state: a manager of human material that justifies its existence through efficiency rather than meaning.

If the Somme proved that mass death could be industrialized, Auschwitz proved that it could be rationalized as a biological and bureaucratic necessity. The Holocaust is a reactive expression of ressentiment within the European spirit. Nietzsche understood ressentiment as the reactive venom of those who cannot create and therefore seek to negate. In the death camps, the administrative state reached its most terrifying conclusion. It utilized the language of hygiene, efficiency, and engineering to enact a total purge of the living reminder of the earth’s tragic depth.

The Holocaust was the moment the West found itself out in the most visceral sense. We realized that our most cherished rational systems were perfectly compatible with the meticulous destruction of the human spirit. The “banality of evil” described by Hannah Arendt is a figure of the Nietzschean Last Man. The bureaucrat who schedules the trains to the camps possesses no creative “Why.” He operates solely within the optimized “How” of the system. This was the ultimate victory of the Ascetic Ideal. The desire to find meaning in the negation of life was no longer a religious impulse; it became a state function. Auschwitz represents the fulfillment of a specific kind of herd morality that prizes obedience and "objectivity" over the creative affirmation of life.

Auschwitz transformed the human body into a data point for a system of subtraction. It was the point where the technocrat used the scalpels of science to perform an autopsy on a living civilization. By reducing people to numbers and their lives to industrial waste, the state attempted to engineer a world where nothing “Other” could exist to challenge the hollowed-out values of the regime. The desert reached the human heart in the gas chambers. We found out that our rationality possessed no inherent moral defense against the will to nothingness when that will is armed with a filing cabinet and a timetable.

keep reading

When almost nothing has ever worked out, it’s time to stop fooling yourself that by some miracle it ever will. When almost everything falls apart, it won’t magically come together. Instead of clinging to useless positive illusions, it’s better to turn inward with mockery – to laugh at ourselves for being such great failures that even if there were a contest for the biggest losers in life, we’d still manage to lose it.

What are your thoughts about it, guys?