aahhh my pet! Zoot and David Gould are going to strangle me mwahaha!
I call myself a non-practicing nihilist, because I intellectually acknowledge nihilism to be the One True Philosophy, but I'm too weak to be able to accept it. At an absolute rudimentary level, I believe everyone should suicide.
It's a long argument but it basically comes down to the fact that I personally believe
everyone necessarily believes in some kind of objective meaning - even if we consciously say 'objective meaning' is itself meaningless (like I do).
Nihilism works - I think - because it follows strict logic. Why I don't like existentialism (and as an aside, saying 'existentialism' is like saying 'religion' and hoping everyone will know precisely what you mean, it's pretty broad) is because at some point somewhere there is a circular argument of "I pursue it because I pursue it". Nihilism requires no such logical anomoly. All that nihilism really violates is our peace of mind and it is why no one likes it very much, I think. It doesn't provide any solutions we would traditionally think of as being 'constructive'. It is necessarily destructive, since it denies any purpose to living.
I can prove with some effort that there is no more reason to live than to suicide. What I have been thusfar unsuccessful in acheiving is convincing anyone that it is in fact more logical to suicide than to live, though I honestly do believe that this is the case.
To boil it down: if there is no objective meaning to existence, then subjective meaning is arbitrary, decided upon purely by circumstance. I take as a logical assumption that if there is no reason to believe something, it is not logical to believe it. (You still can if you want to, however, but this isn't being logical). So if we reject subjective meaning (because it itself has no meaning) we find the value of all actions are equal. If all actions are equal, all we have to grade actions are the expenditure of energy. If all humans operate on a path-of-least-resistance paradigm (which they must) then humans should most logically choose the path of smallest energy expenditure, which is always suicide.
That's horrendously cut down, but it gives you an idea.
