Pride/ Wishful Thinking - versus futility and shirked responsibility

There are always defaults in (what pretends to be) "reasoning" - and defaults are assumptions, not necessities.

Currently, the default assumption is that individual human beings are accidents of causality and randomness, products of physical processes and biology, motivated by evolved instinct... 

And, as a product of more fundamental causes and accidents, each human being therefore has no genuine significance - everybody is inessential; and to believe otherwise is a delusion of pride or sheer wishful thinking. 

Modern Man's default and underlying assumption is: "I don't matter to the universe, or to the world."

And insofar as modern humans matter to anyone, it is framed in terms of providing material, or maybe psychological, "help" to "others"... which, if thought about consecutively, means no more than that we are supposed to help each other to... help-each-other.

Against such a background; anyone who asserts (or even believes privately) that he has a significant cosmic role to play - a destiny in terms of "the cosmos"; is regarded as stupid or dangerous; maybe a childish daydreamer, insane with arrogant pride, or a would-be manipulator and dominator of others.  

And of course any of these might be true, in particular persons.

But they do not exhaust the possibilities.  

It should be recognized that there are very serious - indeed lethal - adverse consequences from an affected humility or conviction of insignificance. 

For a start, there is no basis for taking responsibility for anything at all! - and this fundamental evasion, this refusal to be responsible for one's existence, life, behaviour - is mainstream and encouraged.  

And if we have no spiritual or cosmic role, not even potentially; then life is reduced to mere hedonism - seeking pleasure and gratification, avoiding suffering and misery. And that tends (with uncertainty of expectations) to reduce towards hedonism in the short-term and for-sure; hedonism in here-and-now. 

(Which is why modern people are - compared with their ancestors - so weak-willed, demotivated, and cowardly.)

Also; it tends towards a lowering threshold of suicide - that is disposing of ourselves (preferably without suffering)... whenever it happens to be convenient, or apparently expedient.

(Suicide has become popular on the metaphysical assumption - which is unique to modern Western people - that death is annihilation, the end, and leads to nothing-else.)

Modern Western people therefore see no reason why we should not dispose of ourselves in order to avoid the risk of future suffering, if that currently happens to be what we want... 

(This is what is entailed by regarding "quality of life" as the justification for staying alive.) 

But - if we have no ultimate (cosmic, spiritual, eternal) significance, even potentially, as individuals - then we are just cogs in a machine, bits of a computer program... so there is no solid, objective reason why others should not dispose of us, whenever it suits them (i.e. whenever some kind of pseudo-plausible justification can be cobbled together). 

And this is what we find...

In the past, it seems that people justified themselves, saw reason for existence, not individually but in terms of their loyal membership of a family, clan, tribe... later of a nation.

That's gone. 

Now; it's either justification for each individual person, or no justification at all. 

Clear, simple, difficult. 

And if it is to be justification for each individual person, there can be no shirking of individual responsibility. 

We are each, therefore, of cosmic significance; each life is important to creation; and each person just-is responsible for his own life.

That's the proper default. 

We cannot hide behind service to some "group-good" - because we don't really believe it, so we don't really act upon it. 

It's a fake excuse.