My college experience made me completely lose faith in humanity

Before starting this, I just want to note that it really isn't my intention to start some sort of political "right vs left" debate. I've belonged to both camps in my life and as of now I don't really pledge allegiance to either. I've never really tried to put these thoughts into words before, so bear with me.

I had a fairly typical religious upbringing, focused around a superficial, fundamentalist interpretation of Protestant Christianity. Religion was presented as a set of concrete, objective facts which depicted physical reality as such. I also was caught in an unstable household, where those who claimed to hold Christian values would often act out the exact opposite. By the time I was 12 I started to have some serious doubts into how valid this worldview was, and by 14 I was a militant atheist. This was also the cause of a rather serious existential crisis that I never managed to resolve, I found myself floating alone in the void with seemingly nobody qualified to assist me.

Rather than finding a replacement value system or working to develop one, I fell into the trap of merely looking down on anybody who had a value system. Of any kind. I tried to convince myself of my intellectual superiority over anyone who was unable or unwilling to acknowledge the "truth" that any belief system was just pitiful self-delusion set against the fact that we are mere inconsequential dust mites, floating on a blue rock hurtling through infinite space. Nihilism became my religion, the void became my friend and soon after, pornography became my opiate.

Little did I know I wasn't really a nihilist, a true nihilist has no hope, no future, no reason to continue living. I was still clinging to one last hope. I would certainly figure it all out. Humanity had developed logic, reason, science! Certainly there is a final answer to the meaning of existence! Certainly we could use these tools and our vast accumulation of knowledge to find meaning! We can find the correct direction to take! My life could be put towards something of value! I just needed to know more! I needed an education!

I decided to major in computer science. I had taken some classes in high school and I found I was really good at it. It was challenging, it was rational, it was pure logic. Oh, and it pays really well. I could lose myself and distract myself from the empty void in my soul through solving these various logic puzzles that these classes presented. I always enjoyed the STEM classes I took at college and I generally did pretty well in them.

I also took quite a few classes in the humanities. Some (of the worst) were mandatory, some I took voluntarily. I had hoped this would, in some way, help me find my way in life, to help me solve the crisis that was gnawing at the back of my head. These are the humanities after all, studying the accumulation of knowledge provided by history and deciphering human nature in order to solve difficult moral dilemmas and to keep humanity from falling into an age of ignorance and darkness. My main interests were philosophy, psychology and "sociology".

I loved my humanities classes the first year. My professors told me exactly what I wanted to hear, at the time. Morality is relative, culture is relative, tradition is obsolete, dogma is worthless, you need to break away from whatever prejudices have been instilled in you and think for yourself! There is no objective truth, only opinion! Everything is open to interpretation! Experiment! Live a little! Find out for yourself what life is about! Question everything, investigate everything! "Oh, how wonderful!", I thought. I was going to be taught the tools I needed to create meaning and thrive in life, while remaining independent from any dogmatic belief system being imposed upon me! I can do this! Finally an institution that gets it! The solution is at hand!

Now, my STEM courses always followed a logical progression. You took Calculus 1 and then you took Calculus 2. Calculus 2 would directly build off of and expand the principles taught in Calculus 1. This did not occur in the second year of humanities courses. They seemed to take a complete u-turn.

I remember a particular presentation from early on in my 200 level sociology class. My esteemed professor had a power point up, one of the slides contained pictures of softcore homosexual and bisexual pornography. This was apparently very important to our education because all heterosexual people are homophobic. Did you know that? All of them! It doesn't matter what you think you believe, or how you treat anyone who identified as LGBTQ. If you identify as hetero, you hate gay people and are hell-bent on oppressing them. It's an "unconscious prejudice", so don't you dare even attempt to analyze or question this. How many of you just now felt uncomfortable viewing porn in a public setting? See! Indisputable proof that you hate gay and transgendered people, you wicked sinner you! Now you understand the concept of "privilege"!

This theme naturally continued and expanded. All white people are racist, all men are misogynist. Asians and jews have "internalized white privilege" and are co-opressors with the white man. Black and Hispanic conservatives are suffering from "internalized white supremacy" and therefore they have no value as people. Karl Marx was completely 100% objectively correct about absolutely everything except for the tiny little insignificant trivial mistake that the main conflict in human history is actually over institutional power in terms of racial and sexual demographics, not socioeconomic class. Woopsy daisy! His grand theory just needed a little tweak! It's important to note that there are only two belief systems that exist in the West, those two are: "Social Justice" (the label for what is being taught in this class) and "Fascism". Everybody who doesn't believe in the former is, by definition, an adherent to the latter. Some of them just don't know it yet because they are uneducated!

What's that you say? Marxist ideology has resulted in atrocities against humanity that even eclipse that of National Socialism? No, no, you silly billy! That wasn't Real Marxism! Real Marxism has never even been tried! And the overflowing mass graves left by the regimes of Stalin, Mao and Pot aren't even real! It was just cold war propaganda invented by fascists! You're not a fascist, are you? Just you wait, once we implement true Marxism (the right kind, you know, with the "tiny little tweak" in the fundamental premise) everything will be perfect! The world will be at peace and the sea will become lemonade!

I took these classes, I wrote the papers, I took the tests. Questioning or deviating from this interpretation of reality in any way, shape or form would result in murder scene levels of red ink on the graded paper that was returned to me. Referencing the post-modernist philosophy of relativism that was drilled into our heads the prior year had suddenly become the wrong answer. Apparently only whatever belief system you had before coming to college was subjective or relative and thus open to scrutiny. The belief system now being rammed down your throat is considered to be completely objective, absolute and unquestionable.

The phenomenon that really shocked me to the core was that nobody else seemed to notice this sudden and abrupt transition. The same professors telling us to "question everything" were now telling us to "question nothing". Everybody was a-okay with this. I gave up trying to talk to anyone about it, it was of no use. It seems as though once a person's prior belief system has been extinguished through "relativism" they will cling for dear life to absolutely any belief system that presents itself. This didn't occur with me, perhaps I had spent too much time in the void.

I was completely alone, I withdrew deeply into myself, became extremely depressed and basically stopped taking care of myself. My grades dropped, I stopped going to classes, even the ones I enjoyed. I barely managed to graduate. My existential crisis was not solved, it became much worse. Human reason and rationality as a whole does not seem to be able to solve the problems that face us, and even worse, it's not even trying.

Again, this isn't a "libruls R bad" thread. I am convinced that if the college decided to teach an extremely authoritarian far-right ideology, everybody would have gone along with it. It's historically a precursor to something terrible when kids are getting taught that "everybody who doesn't believe completely in 'X' must be a 'Y' and 'Y's are ignorant, stupid, evil subhumans that are holding back progress".

I have no solution.

 

I should clarify, the modern "woke social justice" liberals are completely batshit insane.

What I meant is that, broadly speaking, Liberalism and Conservatism as a whole are neither good or bad. They're two sides of the same coin. A society that becomes too conservative will eventually stagnate and die as it is not able to adapt to new circumstances and solve new problems. A society that becomes too liberal will eventually commit suicide by undermining the foundations of civilization that deal with problems that have always existed and always will exist in any human organization.

It's a balancing act, once one side gains too much power you are going to have a problem. We currently have a problem.

 

One of my professors was trying to teach us about the right / left political spectrum. He decided the best way to demonstrate this was to equate each side with a particular historical figure. Can you guess what he chose? Right = Hitler, Left = Jesus. He wrote that on the white board.

I shit you not. I wish I had taken a picture.

I'll take your word for it, I've never really read any nihilist philosophy.

Well, I did graduate. The breathe of relief didn't come though, this stuff is becoming more and more mainstream.

I think I'm looking too much at the big picture. If this ideology itself doesn't start a war, the eventual overreaction from the right will. History operates in cycles and I think we are at the beginning of the unpleasant part of the cycle.