It's My Universe And I'll Be Nihilistic If I Want To

ni·hil·ism: Rejection of all distinctions in moral or religious value and a willingness to repudiate all previous theories of morality or religious belief.

If I asked you to name the best time and place in history to live in, most of you (i.e. the ones who aren't giving awkward answers to screw up my rhetoric) would agree that here and now is a pretty good deal, relatively speaking. Let's take a look at the situation - you've got good healthcare, a fairly democratic system, sound education, fair crime rates, reputable life expectancy, laudable scientific awareness. And that's without mentioning things like QVC and cling-film. Yep, we've got it pretty good.

Perhaps that's why every generation always scorns those older and younger than it. We're so convinced that we've got it right, that no changes need to be made. You're either messing with something that works, or you didn't discover it quickly enough. I have the ability to talk to millions of human beings without moving from my current location. I can feed live images to hundreds upon thousands of people. I'm connected, hooked up and aware. I think this is the best the world is ever going to get. And I'm supposed to - if I didn't, well that'd be kind of depressing for everyone.

But, let's face it, this is a pretty poor future is it not? Not only is it hardly the buttons, dials, gauges and flashing things portrayed in the science fiction films and books of eras gone by, but we also seem to missing any kind of religious direction. We've got war, famine, disease and pollution. We've got reckless businesses and untrustworthy politicians. We've got apathetic voters and population booms. We've got a problem on our hands. But when was the last time you ever considered changing the situation?

The answer - you didn't. You didn't, because life has always been this way and you know that things will 'sort themselves out'. After all, we've been through war, famine, disease and the rest of it before. The system irons itself out, and we get back on track. Perhaps this is why people believe in God's power and the predestination of us all - no matter how much we try to screw up the system of this planet, everything returns to this supposed 'harmony'. It's all cool, guys. Just sit tight and wait for the problem to go away. It usually works.

I'd like to ask a question to everyone who believes in God, Religion, or anything of that kind. What if you're wrong? What if - let's just go crazy here - what if there's no God at all. What if all we've got is this junk of rock in some unfashionable end of the universe circling some big, burning thing that seems sort of important. What then? What if no-one is waiting to punish the ruthless, the dastardly, the mean? What if, most importantly, no-one gives a toss if you're a good person or not. What then?

Nihilism doesn't usually do it for me. The whole idea of just denying everything (including existence) always seemed a bit stupid. But when you consider that this world we have, this completely random occurence that has come from a chain of inexplicable chaotic events, and you see how people think that there is some order to it, some purpose... you begin to worry for the future.

Douglas Noel Adams is not a philosopher, a politician or a scientist. He is a writer, a schoolboy who was criticised for having too wild an imagination. I'd like to leave you with a quote from him. No doubt the world will right itself from whatever we do. Global Warming is a bit of a joke when you consider that it happense naturally and all it leads to is an Ice Age which then resets to the kind of environment we have now. There is a system, there's no doubt about that. The only problem we have is that we tend to consider ourselves to be at the centre of it a little too often. This world we've created, these societies and religions - no-one needs them. The universe does not acknowledge them. If we screw the system over, it will screw us back. Ultimately, we're just hydrogen and carbon that's learnt to think.

"If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was god given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."