Nihilism to Meaning by Kevin

Nihilism to Meaning by Kevin - May 2017 Scholarship Essay

Skepticism taken to the extreme, inevitably, produces nihilism. Case in point, being the victim of a drunken man’s driving created doubt in my vision of the rightness of the world. Subsequent loss of physical independence created doubt in my competence as a human. Further loss of confidence in the imagined future I wanted and inability to create a substitute future only solidify my skepticism. Skeptic I was and nihilist I became. Then I discovered Jordan B. Peterson’s Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief.
Tragic events themselves do not all always lead to nihilism. Nelson Mandela suffered 27 years of wrongful imprisonment, far worse events than my own, yet he came out of it as hopeful about the world as ever. However, when nihilism’s self-fulfilling dogma bites its fangs down it is excruciatingly challenging to uproot. If meaning were a house, nihilism would be a void where the foundation should be. Thus, in all my attempts to create meaning in life, I found my house falling through empty space. Unable to support any beliefs or future ideals.
Dr. Peterson’s book sets forward a fundamental breakdown of meaning and how it is that humans structure their beliefs. The book contains the foundation that all belief and ethics are implicitly created upon. To be clear, his book is not a magical panacea for all nihilism. To the contrary, Dr. Peterson even validates nihilism and gives understanding to the causes of radical meaninglessness. Maps of Meaning proves the first steps to building meaning once it is lost in the void of nihilism. Thus by providing me a foundation to base my beliefs, Maps of Meaning has allowed me to drag myself out of the darkness of nihilism and into the light of belief again. A change that will influence the trajectory of my life forever.