Doped

I just took two Ambien, so now I'm going to blog. Let's deconstruct something.

I was thinking today that nihilism in and of itself may not be terribly evil, but that you have to really buy into sollipsism to think so. After all, if you believe that you are the only consciousness in existence, tenuous though that may be, how bad would it be to not care about anything. In fact, a true sollipsist wouldn't believe in any anything to begin with, so a lack of caring for the outside world, focusing one's energies completely inward, in a consciousness, a world, as it were, that is completely introcentric, would actually be an act of altruism.

So, is nihilism the thesis and sollipsism the antithesis? Is altruism antithetical to nihilism, leaving sollipsism as the synthesis of the two? I think, a priori, I began with sollipsism. Isn't that where we always begin? Sollipsism is deconstructed by altruism. If you believe yourself to be the lone ranger in the universe, you are necessarily always already altruistic at any point of time at which your consciousness exists. You can't help yourself, there is nothing to do, alone in the universe, but be gentle to ourselves. It is when we start to see the other as possible and real that the brutality begins.

(Does anyone else have a problem with a deconstruction of sollipsism via altruism that speaks in the second person? I'll fix that on rewrite.)

And then in walks Nihilism, swaggering and drunk. Nihilism says to sollipsism, if you are going to care about everything, you must also care about nothing. Altruism says to sollipsism, who the hell is that guy, and why didn't you tell me you were married. Altruism splits, we never even got to open the wine, and I'm left sitting on the couch with nihilism. Talk about awkward.

Can you exclude everyone else from existence and then not care about anything? The idea deconstructs because to not care about anything you have to at least acknowledge its existence.

Do you acknowledge my existence? I love you, and care about all of you. I hate you, and care about nothing. Unless you acknowledge my existence, and I yours, in which case we have deconstructed nihilism.

Who cares.

What you didn't see, perhaps more interestingly, I kept typing "narcissism" when I meant to type "nihilism." Apparently, the punchline is that when I try to not care about anything, I only end up concerned with myself.

;-P