this picture will never not be funny
just the absurdity of donald duck putting out that statement (which even makes some sense and fits donald’s overall depressed mood) and mickey mouse being the sly one and contradicting donald, coming out with the upper hand from the argument, is just so amusing.
Always hated this meme because Mickey’s dialogue is set up to give the confident and condescending “vibe” of correctness but actually makes no sense if you stop and think about it. "Trusting the chemicals in your brain to tell you they are chemicals " when declaring emotions to have material basis isnt hypocrisy, it’s self consistency, essentially the reverse of hypocrisy. And if the universe is just a material thing with no basis for intrinsic value, what even is there to “fight” about that? You cannot exactly punch the nature of reality into submission, or change the behavior of the universe through sheer force of will. And if you could, there isn’t even a reason given for why you would even want to do so, it’s just implied that human values and emotions being a result of material reality is undesirable because what? “chemicals bad” I guess?
I used to agree with you, but then I realised why it works:
Mickey is basically repeating the old absurdist critique, “if nothing matters, it doesn’t matter that nothing matters”. He’s saying why are you despairing that everything in your brain is chemicals? Is it because the chemicals in your brain told you to? Then stop giving a shit, they’re just chemicals!
And then he goes on to take up an Existentialist position in the vein of Sartre and declare that to live a meaningful life is to struggle against your base urges and cultural indoctrination, and to instead live a life whose meaning is determined by your own choices.
Ah, then I see my point of confusion: I do not see “nothing matters” as a fundamentally undesirable position (actually kind of the reverse), so to me Donald’s statement does not read as despare at all, it just reads as a neutral explanation of his stance on it. As such, Mickey’s statement doesn’t read to me as absurdist reassurance, rather, Donald’s reads more as something an absurdist might say and Mickey’s response reads more as “how dare you believe that, that idea must be somehow made false even if it is true and I wish to use violence to bring that about”
Mickey wants you to fight nihilism.
What does that even entail though, you cant exactly force things to objectively matter if they don’t already, there’s no mechanism by which we could influence that. If you just assert values that you hold personally, you’ve merely created subjective meaning and done nothing relevant to nihilism’s truth value. Meanwhile If nihilism turns out to be objectively false, then you can’t fight it because it wouldnt even exist to fight. You can fight nihilists I guess, but then you’re in the generally disliked position of fighting people based on a belief of theirs that does not require them cause any harm to you or anyone else, because it doesn’t require anything at all.
Its about as bizarre a call to action as declaring that you dislike some branch of math and want people to help you fight it.
You’re kind of an idiot, huh.