Many of you have written to ask me, what do I mean when I use the word nothingness in my previous video?
Just to recap in two sentences, in my previous video I said that reality is so harsh, so difficult to accept, so nightmarish, so intimidating, so disorienting and dislocating, that people react in one of three ways.
They develop functional effective psychosis. In other words, they invent all kinds of things, and then they project their own inventions, their own pieces of fiction, their own narratives, scripts, movies, they project them outside, and they attribute to these figments of their imagination and mind, they attribute to these figments an objective reality, so they invent God, then they project God outside, and then they say, well, you see, God exists, he's our type. Of course, it's a piece of fiction, it's a figment of the imagination and the human collective mind.
That is not to say that these fictitious characters, these fictitious narratives don't have power, they're very powerful, they affect our lives, our moods, our emotions, our cognitions, they affect history, they alter the course of human affairs, so they're very powerful. God is by far the most powerful non-entity, but it's not an entity, not in the ontological sense, it's an epistemological entity, it's a figment of the mind.
So technically this is psychosis, because in psychosis people confuse internal objects with external objects.
And then there's narcissism, that's the second solution.
The second solution is to say, I am the source of all meaning, I am the one who navigates my own life, I'm in full control, I am in effect God, I'm God-like, I have all the attributes of God, I'm omniscient, I'm omnipotent, I'm perfect, I'm brilliant, not to mention, of course, handsome, and so on and so forth, so this is the narcissistic solution.
Viktor Frankl, logotherapy, it's a kind of proto-narcissistic solution, therapy of meaning.
But today there's an avalanche of life coaches, philosophers, public intellectuals, wannabe psychologists, real psychologists, people with academic degrees and zero knowledge, people with a lot of knowledge and no academic degrees. I mean, gurus, mystics, yogis, you name it, there's a proliferation of people who are going to tell you how to become narcissists, and they're going to do it in 12 steps or 10 steps or 5 steps, but it will always lead ultimately to a narcissistic solution.
The focus is on you, you are the beginning and the end, you are the alpha and the omega, you are the prima causa and the rheum movies, you are everything, you are the universe, you are the world.
We can find echoes of this, even in the Talmud and other writings, ancient writings, in the Vedic writings and so on.
Narcissism is not a new thing, it's a solution to life's tribulations, vicissitudes, vagaries and exigencies.
I love to use these big words because I know the vast majority of you don't know them and it frustrates you, frustrates you and makes you feel inferior, which leads me to nothingness.
Nothingness is the third solution.
Again, unfortunately, I'm not the one who had invented it.
Nothingness underlies major religions such as Islam, the very word Islam means to submit. Nothingness underlies most Eastern mystical traditions and most Eastern religions, including the Kabbalah, in many respects. Nothingness underlies a lot of thinking in many parts of the world and actually 80% of humanity adhere to one variant of nothingness or another.
Enlightenment in the West meant taking control over nature, overpowering nature, making nature subservient, using nature as a reservoir, a repository for the benefit of mankind.
So this was the Western version of enlightenment. The Eastern version of enlightenment was disappearing, vanishing, not being, the art of not being.
And so nothingness is nothing new, but the tidal wave, the tsunami of narcissism in the West requires a rephrasing and reframing of nothingness in Western terms so that we can counter the pernicious toxic effect of all these aforementioned coaches and public intellectuals and so on.
Because all they do is teach you how to be narcissist. Simple.
If I had to distill and summarize most of the books I've read written by these luminaries, it's let me show you how to become a better functioning, a high functioning narcissist. Let me show you how to dominate and overpower others. Let me show you how to become a top lobster.
So let me show you how to become a nobody, a nothing, which essentially is what you are already. You just have to acknowledge it.
So let's go.
Embrace nothingness, an antidote to narcissism.
First of all, everything I'm about to say is backed by hard data, by sometimes centuries of statistics from all over the world. It's not confined to the West. And these statistics show the following consistently and over centuries or even millennia when we try to extrapolate or interpolate statistics backwards.
Number one, accept that you are special only to yourself. Unique only as a statistic. There's never been a combination of genes such as yours, your phenotype and genotype are unique, but unique in the sense that they're non-repeatable, perhaps luckily for the world.
But accept that you're special only to yourself, indistinguishable socially from billions of others. You are a speck of dust. No one can tell you apart from almost anyone else.
Today, the homogenizing forces of mass media, social media, international transport, all these forces crash and mold you into a replica, into a simulacrum, into a copy of the next guy or the next girl. You dress the same. You talk the same. You think the same. You are nothing but a clone, very often an unthinking clone.
Number two, accept that you are here today, gone tomorrow. The source of the problem with this pandemic, for example, is the absolute refusal to accept death, the rejection of death.
I am so precious and cosmically significant. How could I die? I should never die. I should sacrifice the economy. I should sacrifice civil liberties. I should sacrifice human liberties. I should, hell, I should sacrifice medicine itself, medical knowledge, just to preserve this treasure that I am.
So death used to be a part of life. Death used to be, in some places, the destination of life. People accepted the death sentence that is life.
We need to restore this. You need to accept that you're ephemeral. You're utterly forgettable. You need to embrace the fact, to grasp the fact that your life is random, utterly random, arbitrary, and to borrow from a much bigger mind than mine, nasty, brutish and short. Your life has no meaning. No meaning, it's meaningless. It's utterly insignificant. No one will remember you, not even your great grandchildren.
Do you remember your great-great-grandparents' names? Do you know anything about them?
You will be gone. You will be erased. You will be deleted. You will become, ultimately, the nobody that you are, the speck of dust. You will return to dust, as the ancient wise text keeps reminding you.
You're nothing. You're nothing but a machine which converts food to other less savory products. That's your main function.
And to propagate your genes, if a woman deems you, deems you worthy. And in 60% of cases, women do not deem you worthy. 60% of all men do not propagate.
Chances are that you will die childless if you're a man or hated by your offspring if you are of either gender.
Women are better off. 70% of them have children, at least one.
Number three, surrender. Surrender and submit. Accept, embrace. Just be. Resistance is futile. Change is an illusion. There is nothing you can do about your essential nothingness, about your innate character, temperament, personality. Call it whatever you want. Nothing you can do about this.
It's 50% nature, 50% nurture. Your genes have determined you long before you have emerged from your mother's equally meaningless body. You are nothing. You were born nothing. You will die nothing. And you will do nothing in between.
The sooner you accept this, the happier you will be.
Succumb to your social station. Don't reach. Don't overreach. Accept your future, which would look exactly like your past. And even worse than your present by all measures.
The people you care about don't care about you. If they care about you, they care about themselves in you. The people you care about is a social fiction, a figment, a structure, a socially acceptable sublimated interaction.
But you know what? The people you care about, they are also nobodies. They are also random mutations in a giant sea and swamp of genes. The selfish gene.
You have come from nowhere and you're going nowhere. You're an assemblage of unicellular mechanisms. You are nothing but an agglomeration of amoeba in bacteria, nothing more.
You think you are. Because people are telling you that you are. If you pay $20 to buy their books, they will tell you anything you want to hear. Anything you want to hear.
Not every problem has a solution. Your problem has no solution, statistically speaking. And not everything you regard as a problem is a problem.
Actually in reality, there are very, very, very few problems. Reality is just what it is. Simply what it is. That's it. It's not problematic. It's not promising. It's not fulfilling. It's not delivering. It's nothing.
Reality is simply is.
Number four, if you insist on protesting futilely, because protest is futile, but if you insist on protesting futilely, do it by withdrawing. Do it by disengaging. In passivity, there is safety and the chance for change. Gandhi said it, not me.
The systems set up by the elites want you to fight. They encourage you to fight. They want you to fight because it guarantees that you will keep losing. They want to make you a loser. They want to convert you into a loser. The more you fight, the more of a loser you are.
Life is stronger than you. The power structures are stronger than you. The establishment is bigger than you. They're all overwhelming and overpowering. They're going to consume you and they're going to spit you out the writhing shell that you are, emptiness encased in protoplasm. They're going to do this to you.
Fighting, protesting, resisting all these foster mental illness and the mentally ill are submissive.
And that's precisely the way the rich and the powerful like it. They want you to be dysfunctional and defective and hopeless and broken and damaged because that way they can control you. That way they can leverage your infirmity and disability to their benefit.
Don't give them this pleasure. Go away. Disconnect. Don't play the game. Overturn the chessboard. Walk away. Tell them to F off because you are on their turf. You are in their territory. You are playing games subject to rules that they had written.
You can, you never play your game, your own game. You're playing their game.
And you know what? There's no way you can end them. There's no way you can change them. There's no way you can delete them.
They are here to stay. They have been here for hundreds of years, for thousands of years, and they will be here for hundreds of years, thousands of years, the very same families, the very same people.
They get intermarried. They interbreed. They preserve power in clans and tribes. There's no way for you to break in. And there's no way for you to break out as long as you adhere to their rules, their games. And their rules and their games include all the advice you get from coaches and public intellectuals and professors of this discipline and yogis and mystics and so on.
All these people have a vested interest in the power structure. If you want to sell books, you need publishing houses. It means you like money. It means you have what to do with money. It means you want money. And if you want money, it means you're part of the establishment, part of the power structure.
Don't let these people deceive you. They are not your friends. They're out to take everything you have, however minimal it is. They're out to leave you destitute.
Number four, you cannot alter yourself to be better. You cannot change yourself in any meaningful way.
I'm going to repeat this. It must enter your thick skulls. It must penetrate whatever it is you have that passes for a brain. And many of you are brain dead. But still, let's try. Even if you electrocute a frog, it jumps. Maybe you will jump. Listen to this well again.
You cannot better yourself. You cannot alter yourself in any meaningful way. You are who you are, fundamentally, profoundly.
And in most cases, who you are is an unendowed zero and loser.
The overwhelming, vast majority of the teeming, unwashed masses are exactly this, teeming and unwashed.
Not everyone can be a winner, never mind how he changes his posture. Not everyone can be a hero.
Accept that you're a zero. Accept that you're a loser. And accept above all that you will always be a zero and a loser.
This is the way of the world. This is the way you will remain to the day you die, statistically alone and impoverished.
This is life. This is the hand you've been dealt. This is reality. This is the universe.
You don't like it. You know what to do.
But you're too coward, cowardly for that.
So I'm relaxed. You're not going to do it. You're not going to do it.
Number five, if you were born to poor and uneducated parents, you and your children, and your children's children will end up even poorer and with irrelevant education that they can do nothing with. Fact. It's a fact.
In the last 20 years, for the first time in American history, the younger generations earn less than their ancestors and progenitors and parents. People are becoming more poor, not less poor. Every generation is poorer than the previous one.
Income inequality has exploded. Exploded. The hundred richest people on earth have as much money and property as the lowest, the poorest, three and a half billion people. One hundred people. That's one hundred. One hundred. You can count them. They have more money and wealth than the poorest three and a half billion on Earth. That's how bad the situation is.
Your chances to break out of poverty, out of the circumstances into which you had been born via education and so on. That's a myth. That's a fairy tale for the feeble-minded. That is a tool, an instrument of manipulation by the elites. They're lying to you. There's no way out. You're trapped. You're trapped in your birthplace, in your birth circumstances, and you will never, ever break out. Ever.
So what's the solution? How to make headway in life? How to end up being top dominant lobster?
Well, the only two ways, the only two ways to progress, the only two ways to make headway are to be born to the right parents, but maybe you got that part too late, or to marry the right spouse.
Listen well. There is no other way. Nevermind how many books you read, how many authors you make rich by stupidly giving them your money. Nevermind which guru you adulate, never mind which God you worship, never mind which amount of education you acquire, never mind where you move to, never mind what you do. You will never, ever change or get better or progress.
Except if you marry the right girl or guy, women know this. They look for rich guys. They look for alpha males. They look for successful men. Well, not alpha males, but successful men, men who will provide them.
Women know this. They've known this all along since the dawn of history, probably before when we were all chimpanzees. Or get born to the right parents.
If you believe in Indian nonsense, next incarnation in your karma, choose the right parents.
Social mobility is a myth.
Hundreds of studies, including most recently, Piketty's and others, hundreds of studies proved conclusively that there is no such thing as social mobility, especially not in countries that profess social mobility as a founding myth, as an ethos.
Social mobility among industrialized nations is lowest in the United States and highest, by the way, in Sweden, a socialist country.
There's no such thing as social mobility. I told you, you will never end up richer, more powerful, more educated, better off than your parents, actually statistically less so. You will never be accepted by the elite, by the upper classes.
If you were not born into them. You will always be an outlier, an outsider, an outcast. You will always be shunned, ridiculed, mocked, excommunicated, trampled on, reduced to rubble if you attempt to raise your head. Raise your head, you'll be decapitated.
There is no such thing as social mobility except your caste, your station in life. This is where you are stuck, make the best of it.
You want to progress, you want to be top dog. You should emerge from the right hole or penetrate the right hole.
And these are the only two ways to improve your lot in life.
Now to the crux of the matter.
Anyone, repeat, anyone who tells you that he has a solution, a cure, a system, a therapy, a cause, a framework, a religion, a God, love, empathy, or rules for life. Anyone who tells you any of these things is a glorified con artist, probably a psychopathic narcissist.
And anyone who tells you this is out for your money and adulation. He seeks either narcissistic supply or power or money, and the power that money gives, or sex, which is all about power, to quote Oscar Wilde.
These are power-hungry, money-hungry, sex-hungry people. They want your subservient admiration, and of course they want everything you have, and they're going to take it from you. They're going to take it from you because they're merciless and ruthless and callous, and they're very, very sick people.
Adhering to a delusion, to a confabulation, to a fairy tale, to a fantasy, or to an outright lie can be comforting. When you were inside the narrative, you think you found the way, you found the cure, you found the magic, you found the philosopher's stone. Now you can convert your leaden, dreary life into gold, you say to yourself.
I found the rules to transform myself and my life. I found the creed. I found the system. I found the therapy. I found the method. I found, I found, I found.
There's nothing to be found. It's all delusions, confabulations, fairy tales, fantasies, and outright lies.
And the people who propagate them, and the people who perpetrate them, and the people who promulgate them, they are scammers. They are cheating you. They are deceiving you. They're lying to you. And they know they are doing this. And they're laughing all the way to the bank, having taken money from you, the brain dead, the comatose, the zombies, losers, the zombie losers of this world.
What you're doing is replacing a manageable problem, how to embrace life and accept it as it is, with an even bigger one.
Why?
Because not everything that is true works, I admit. And not everything that works is true. But you should always prefer what's true to what's working.
If you have two pieces of information, two beliefs, two ideas, two people, one of them contains and bodies, reifies the truth. And one of them tells you, suspend your judgment. Trust me, close your eyes, blindly follow, and you will feel much better.
Choose the truth. The truth is hard, but it's hopeless. Truth will never give you hope.
Why?
Because the world is hopeless and meaningless. Leads nowhere, comes from nowhere, will end in nothing.
The alternative, the lies, the delusions, the rules for a meaningful life, the restoration of order, whatever that is. All this nonsense, the yogis and the mystics and the hodgepodge of Eastern ideologies and mythologies and religions, and religion in general, and the nonsensical belief in the objective existence of a supreme being or superpower or a higher power, which we had invented 4,000 years ago.
All this self-deception, it does one thing, it gives you hope.
And listen, listen well. It's counterintuitive, but nothing is more harmful to your health than hope.
Not cigarettes, not SARS, COVID, nothing is more dangerous to your life, well-being and health, mental and physical, than hope. It's the greatest toxic venomous poison ever invented by the human mind.
Because hope brings forth expectations, and expectations invariably result in frustration. Frustration leads to depression and other forms of mental illness.
Hope is a counterfactual poison. It's not real. Reality is hopeless. Your only hope is to accept hopelessness as the only outlet. Your only hope is to just stop it, have no expectations, see no future, strive towards nothing, just be.
Your compulsive need to believe in something, to believe in someone, to follow someone, to trust something, a God, a guru, a belief, all these lead you to either subservience, abject subjugation, or to dysfunction, physical and mental.
And in many cases, perhaps in most cases, hope, following someone, having a God, having a guru, in most casesleads you ultimately to both subservience and subjugation and mental and physical illness.
Number eight, your children, again, associated erroneously with hope. There's nothing more hopeless than children.
Your children will grow up, statistically, hating you. I repeat, most children hate their parents, so they will grow up to hate you. Most of them will be depressed and anxious at some point, miserable, mentally ill, diseased, and they will act immorally. They will be broken and damaged long before they reach their 40th year. And they will find no solace and no decor and no support and no help and no hope in their own lives. Their lives will resemble in every element your life, aimless, empty, hopeless, meaningless, random.
So, just number nine, focus on experiencing your life, focus on living, focus on existence itself.
Don't worry so much. Don't overthink, don't overanalyze.
Statistically speaking, you are probably way too stupid to think or to analyze.
You're not doing it well. You are getting the wrong results. You are inputting the wrong data. You're processing everything wrongly because the vast majority of humanity are seriously, seriously dim-witted and feeble-minded.
You are good at, very good at, eating, drinking, making love sometimes, having fun, watching the sunrise and the sunset, butterflies flapping their wings. Your children howling at the yard. Sports are good for you.
That's it. Don't reach above that. You are not qualified. You're not trained. You don't have the traits. You don't have the intelligence. You don't have the intellect. You don't have anything it takes.
I'm not saying, I'm not generalizing. There are the zero, zero, zero, one percent who are the exception to this room.
But why gamble? Why speculate that you belong in this group? It's narcissistic. It's grandiose. In all likelihood, you don't belong in this group.
Watch the flowers bloom. There's no bigger source of happiness. Trust me.
And finally, number 10, embracing nothingness is an antidote to narcissism.
Number 10, live and let live. Let live.
Do not moralize. Do not motivate. Do not hector. Do not educate. Do not punish, argue, debate, convince, cajole, position yourself, compare, repair, reach out, converse, expect, hope, demand, or befriend.
Just go away. Just be and let others be.
They have the same right to their insignificant existence as you do to yours. And their lives are as empty, meaningless, and random as yours.
You have no privileged position, no superior status. And to think that you can acquire one just by buying a book or following some rules or listening to some mystic or some guru or some public intellectual is grandiose. It's also counterfactual. It's not going to work. You're just going to waste whatever little money you have. Spend it on nothing.
And five years later or 10 years later, or if you're a really complete idiot 20 years later, you will discover that everything I'm saying is true, that you're a loser, that you are nobody, that you're indistinguishable from a billion others, and that your best bet for happiness is just to accept this.