what if nothing is sacred—not gods, not love, not ideology—but only our fear of the void? this piece dives into how everything we worship might just be a desperate attempt to fill the silence of nothingness. not a rejection of meaning, but a raw meditation on where we beg it to exist.
a child tortures an insect for fun. no punishment follows. no divine retribution, no karmic balancing act, not even a guilty conscience. just a brief flicker of sadism, swallowed by the void. now zoom out—what if that’s the universe in miniature? a place where suffering happens, and that’s it. no grand reckoning. no cosmic justice. just endless, echoing silence.
this isn’t an attempt to be edgy. it’s an honest look at the terrifying possibility that our values—our beliefs about right and wrong, beauty and horror, meaning and futility—are not built into the fabric of the universe. they might be hallucinations, functional delusions we pass down like bedtime stories, soothing us against the dark.
and here’s the real horror: the stories work. they keep us going. they help us wake up, kiss our kids, vote, protest, build museums, bury our dead with dignity. but what if they’re no more grounded than a dream that evaporates the moment you try to explain it? what if justice, love, purpose—all of it—is just scaffolding we nailed over an abyss?
this is not an abstract debate for bored academics. it’s the psychic background radiation of modern life. and ignoring it doesn’t make it go away—it just leaves it humming beneath everything we do.
the roots of reasonable fear
fear, in its raw form, is a signal. it’s our brain’s way of saying, “heads up, something’s off.” most of the time, it’s tied to tangible threats—think dodging a speeding car or bracing for a tough conversation. but the fear of an arbitrary world is trickier. it’s not about a clear and present danger but a possibility: what if the values we live by are just stories we’ve told ourselves, no more valid than any other? this isn’t a new worry. blaise pascal, back in the 17th century, got chills thinking about the “eternal silence of these infinite spaces.” he wasn’t just being poetic. he was grappling with the same unease we feel when we wonder if our moral compass is just a cultural artifact, as flimsy as a meme that goes viral and then fades.
is this fear reasonable? that’s the million-dollar question. on one hand, it’s hard to dismiss. science keeps peeling back the layers of the universe, giving us facts—galaxies, quarks, black holes—but it’s silent on values. it tells us what is, not what ought to be. if we lean only on empirical data, we’re left with a world of raw information, no guideposts for meaning. add to that the sheer diversity of human values across history and cultures. what one society calls sacred, another calls barbaric. if values are so malleable, so tied to time and place, how can we be sure ours aren’t just arbitrary? this line of thought can make even the most grounded person feel like they’re free-falling.
on the other hand, there’s a case for calling this fear overblown. humans have been spinning values out of thin air for millennia, and we’re still here, building societies, raising kids, making art. the evaluative dimension of life—let’s call it our shared moral and cultural operating system—has practical success. it works, at least enough to keep civilization humming. plus, we don’t have much choice. we can’t just opt out of valuing things, any more than we can opt out of breathing. even the most hardcore skeptic, the one who says “nothing matters,” still values their morning coffee or their right to rant about it. bernard williams, a philosopher with a knack for cutting through the fog, once said it’s not absurd for humans to see the world through a human lens. it’s just what we do. but that’s where the rub is: just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s justified.
this tension—between the fear that our values are baseless and the instinct to keep living as if they’re not—is what makes the question so sticky. it’s not enough to shrug and say, “well, it’s always been this way.” that’s dodging the issue. the fear is reasonable because it points to a real possibility: our values might not hold up under scrutiny. but it’s also reasonable to push back, to say that a system that’s carried us this far can’t be entirely bunk. the trick is figuring out how to live with both the fear and the pushback, without tipping into despair or denial.
decentering the dread
so, how do we cope? one strategy is what i’ll call decentering—not ignoring the fear but shifting it to the periphery, letting it linger without letting it run the show. think of it like background noise at a busy café. it’s there, but you don’t let it drown out your conversation. decentering isn’t about pretending the question of arbitrary values doesn’t matter. it’s about recognizing that we can’t answer it definitively, and maybe we don’t need to, at least not right now. this approach has deep roots, and it’s not just for philosophers. ordinary people, across cultures and eras, have done it instinctively when the alternative—upending their entire worldview—felt too destabilizing.
take the azande, a people studied by anthropologist e.e. evans-pritchard. their belief in witchcraft was central to their way of life, explaining everything from crop failures to personal grudges. when evans-pritchard pointed out a logical flaw in their system—that if witchcraft is hereditary, everyone must be a witch—they didn’t argue or panic. they just… moved on. they decentered the critique, not because they were irrational, but because their entire social fabric depended on that belief. questioning it wholesale would’ve been like pulling the plug on their reality. we do this too, more than we admit. when science raises thorny questions about free will or morality, we don’t always dive in headfirst. sometimes we sidestep, not out of cowardice, but because we need a stable base to keep living.
history is full of examples. michel de montaigne, a 16th-century french thinker, saw the laws of his time as riddled with flaws—contradictory, unfair, sometimes outright cruel. yet he didn’t call for a revolution. he worried that tearing down the system, flawed as it was, risked “everything crumbling into bits.” so he decentered the flaws, focusing on practical reforms while preserving the broader framework. even rené descartes, the guy who doubted everything to build modern science, leaned on a “provisional moral code” to get through the day. he didn’t question the customs of his society, not because he was lazy, but because he needed a foothold while he rebuilt the world of facts.
this isn’t to say decentering is always the right move. it can slide into evasion, a fancy way of dodging hard truths. take the problem of evil in christian theology—how can a good, all-powerful god allow so much suffering? some believers, like the 18th-century philosopher thomas reid, admitted they couldn’t answer but refused to let it unravel their faith. critics might call that a cop-out, and they’ve got a point. if a problem strikes at the core of a belief system, decentering it can look like sticking your head in the sand. the enlightenment, with its rosy view of human progress, faces a similar challenge. history’s parade of wars, genocides, and atrocities—hagel called it a “most fearful picture”—suggests humans might not be as perfectible as the enlightenment hoped. if that’s true, it’s not a minor glitch; it’s a crack in the foundation. decentering here feels less like wisdom and more like denial.
living with the tension
so where does that leave us? caught between two impulses, both reasonable in their own way. on one side, there’s the socratic urge to chase truth, no matter how brutal. bernard williams, near the end of his life, clung to the hope that a “truthful story” could keep despair at bay. on the other side, there’s the nietzschean caution that truth might not always be our friend. “there is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind,” he warned. both perspectives have weight. it’s noble to face the void, to ask if our values are just fairy tales we tell to fend off the dark. but it’s also human to flinch, to protect the fragile scaffolding that makes life livable.
decentering offers a middle path, but it’s not a cure-all. it’s a way to keep the fear at arm’s length without pretending it doesn’t exist. the catch is knowing when to decenter and when to dig in. if we decenter every challenge, we risk stagnation, clinging to values that might be indefensible. but if we question everything, we might end up like melville’s bartleby, saying “i would rather not” to life itself. the evaluative dimension of our life—our bulwark against the “eternal silence” pascal feared—is imperfect, full of cracks and contradictions. yet it’s also what lets us distinguish between a life worth living and one that’s not. it’s what makes civilization possible, flawed as it is.
the fear that our values are arbitrary isn’t going away. it’s an enduring problem, part of the human condition. we can’t resolve it with a single answer or a killer argument. instead, we live with it, balancing the urge to question with the need to act. reason allows both. it’s reasonable to fear a world where nothing matters, where our distinctions between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, collapse into meaninglessness. but it’s also reasonable to keep going, to choose values and live by them, even if we can’t prove they’re ultimate. edmund burke, writing about the chaos of the french revolution, warned against tearing off “all the decent drapery of life.” he wasn’t wrong. but neither was socrates, who said the unexamined life isn’t worth living. the truth is, we need both—the drapery and the examination.
in the end, this fear is a reminder of our limits. we’re finite creatures in an infinite universe, trying to carve out meaning with tools that might not be up to the task. but that’s not a reason to give up. it’s a reason to keep wrestling, to keep choosing, to keep living. the alternative—checking out, like bartleby—isn’t just bleak; it’s inhuman. so we sail on, in our leaky ship, patching it as we go, knowing the sharks are out there but refusing to jump overboard. that’s not evasion. it’s courage, dressed up in everyday clothes.
