Nihilism is Philosophical Hedonism & We Are All Susceptible (Pessimism Protects You Psychologically)

In this episode, we delve into the philosophical and psychological aspects of pessimism, nihilism, and antinatalism. The discussion begins with the exploration of Emil Cioran's ideas and the allure of pessimism and nihilism. We then touch on how adopting such mindsets can act as psychological protection and social dominance hacks. Throughout the episode, we contrast these perspectives with more optimistic and proactive approaches to life, personal responsibility, and earnest enthusiasm. Includes a critique of C. S. Lewis's argument from desire and the importance of avoiding nihilistic tendencies in personal relationships.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. Today is going to be an interesting and philosophical episode, but also focused on psychology and sort of best mental health practices for living. I was listening. to a podcast diving into the philosophy of Emil Kairon, who wrote Better Not to Have Been Bored.

He, the Romanian philosopher. And he exhibited many traits that I think that all of us are susceptible to, which is the protective shell of dumerism, pessimism. And this feeling of suffering. And I think that if we investigate this, we can understand why it feels so comfy to go to this place

Speaker 9: That's cool. I guess you can join up with us

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Antinatalists.

Speaker 9: if you want.

Speaker 10: Yeah, we're gonna go to the graveyard [00:01:00] and write poems about death and how pointless life is.

Speaker 9: Thanks for offering to let me in your clit, guys. But to be honest, I'd rather be a crying little pussy than a

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: Antinatalist.

Speaker 9: kid. We'll see you, Stan.

Speaker 10: He's right. I don't even know who I am anymore. I like liking life a lot more than hating it. Screw you guys. I'm going home. Go ahead and go back

Speaker 9: to your sunshine, fairytale.

Malcolm Collins: And, and, and, and just as a, a bit of a preview here, I think there's a few things that play I think one is, it removes some degree of responsibility for one's own failures or states, so there is less need for self judgment or self motivation two is I believe that it looks chic, like it, it, it looks sophisticated.

Yes. Sophisticated. Three is it makes you much more difficult for other people to attack. It's a very lazy position to hold intellectually speaking, because [00:02:00] when people attempt to attack you. You know, you're just like, yeah, you know, life is terrible. Yeah, et cetera. And like, you can't hurt me. Like I'm, I'm at rock bottom.

Where are you going to push me? Exactly.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: I found a video of some real Americans running across a far left voluntary human extinction rally.

Speaker 7: Are these the Nazis?

Speaker 6: No, Donnie, these men are nihilists. There's nothing to be afraid of.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: My first world life has involved some degree of suffering and I didn't consent to being born.

Speaker 7: It's not fair!

Speaker 6: Fair? Who's the f*****g nihilist around here, you bunch of f*****g crybabies? This guy's gonna hurt us, Walter. No, Donnie. These men are cowards. I f**k you!

Speaker 7: F**k

Speaker 6: you!

Speaker 7: I f**k you! I f**k you! Ball, man. Hey, dick. Oh.

Hey, dick.

Speaker 6: I

Malcolm Collins: so let's go over all of these through the framing of this individual. All right. So this individual is really important to antinatalist philosophy where I [00:03:00] study, you know, if our opponents have a philosophy, I make a point of studying their intellectual arguments as much as I could.

He, did not have any particularly sophisticated or interesting intellectual arguments. But he had a very interesting, buddhism

Simone Collins: because I feel like one, this is a very, very, very old meme. The life is suffering meme is like extremely old. So what is, what are his novel? Are

Malcolm Collins: I don't remember it. No, it was something like just not interesting. The other person I was studying today was C. S. Lewis who had, it was dumb for like way more interesting ways than this guy was dumb. But we'll, we will do C. S. with our audience.

Simone Collins: If you're calling C. S. Lewis dumb, boy, oh boy. I'm sorry, Simone.

I'm sorry.

Malcolm Collins: He wasn't dumb.

Simone Collins: Emails we're going to get.

Malcolm Collins: He was straight up retarded. Like, I was shocked at the stupidity of some of his arguments.

this, this yes, Lewis rant was moved to the end of the episode. If you want to see it, you can go there.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-4: That said, I'm probably wrong to call him dumb.

It's more that [00:04:00] he's very Malcolm Gladwell y. He mostly just aggregates other people's ideas and tells them in a way that is more accessible to the average person. And when he has independent or new ideas, like the argument from desire, they're typically very, very bad. He doesn't really interject any interesting new ideas to the conversation.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So this guy did basically he was maxing this particular perspective in a way that I think that we can all learn from because we're all are drawn to this perspective.

One of the things he did is even though his book was famous, even though he was famous. He tried to never allow his book to win any awards, so he'd withdraw from any awards that he could win. He would put himself in environments that made him less likely to become more famous, specifically trying to hang out with other failures and be more of a failure, and specifically liked associating disproportionately with failures.

The line that he used is [00:05:00] that he didn't hate misfortune. He hated being surprised by it. And I think that this is something that we all know to some extent. In many ways, it feels safer to not even expose yourself to the potentiality of success because having some goal and not achieving it can hurt more than never having had the goal in the first place.

However, You are never going to achieve any life of genuine satisfaction if you don't build goals for yourself and occasionally fail. Or even predominantly fail. I would say that a lot of successful people early in their careers predominantly failed before they reached that level of success.

Thoughts, Simone?

Simone Collins: I think that's absolutely true. I, I, when you, when you describe that behavior, it just made me think that we're listening to [00:06:00] the description of someone who's suffering from some fairly severe emotional problems.

Malcolm Collins: I don't think so because I think that that's an easy thing to say, Oh, this person's suffering from depression.

Oh, this person is without really, it just seems

Simone Collins: like like super avoidant behavior, maybe that he's very anxious about recognition.

Malcolm Collins: It's not this is I think the mistake here, right? And I think that this is one of the things that we need to look out for was in our modern culture Is the medicalization? And the depersonalization of things that are very much individual choices and this was an individual choice that he made and the reason i'm