Q & A

Q: Are you a nihilist?

A: The short answer is no.

The long answer is that a nihilist is a person who believes human existence has no objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. My fiction writing would suggest that I am a nihilist since I write about characters like Jack Bass who are clearly nihilists. But I am working on future projects with characters who are definitely not nihilists while I have other characters that make Jack Bass look like a boy scout.

I don't believe there is a God, so life has no theocentric meaning. In other words, the meaning and purpose of life is not related to what a Supreme Being wants or thinks. As a secular individualist, I believe in an anthropocentric meaning and purpose of life. Basically, everyone wants to be happy. This is common to all humans. There is no human being that does not desire happiness. This is the basis of all ethics.

There is a right way and a wrong way to be happy. This is the product of logic in much the same way that 4 is the product of 2 + 2. This is objective. In the case of ethics, you can't be happy and habitually ignore the Golden Rule. This is because it gives others the right to ignore that rule as well and fuck your shit up. This is why even criminals find it in their best interest to formulate and abide by some code. This is why all religions in the world have some formulation of the Golden Rule. God does not need to exist to make this rule work.

Where I seem most nihilistic is in regard to values. I don't think a Monet is superior to a Pollock in any transcendant sense. I don't think pink is superior to black. I don't think Mexican food is superior to Chinese food. I might like Chinese more than Mexican food. But that is person relative.

Aesthetics are negotiable to me but not ethics. You can paint your car a ridiculous scheme of lime green and turqoise, but you don't get to drive it through a shop window and kill a bunch of people. So, I'm not a nihilist. For the Muslim, his only concern seems to be whether or not you were eating a pork sandwich when the crash occurred. Because I could give a shit about the sandwich, this makes me a "nihilist."

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