Toward the beginning of The Colonel, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's harrowing and incisive novel about life in post-revolutionary Iran (1979 and beyond), he portrays one of the chief portagonists, Amir, remarking, "I'm capable of anything when the world treats me as nothing . . . and, insofar as I have become nothing, all things are therefore permissible to me."
     Though this observation is eerily similar, in content and worldview, to Dostoyevsky's far more famous quote, as it appeared in his Brothers Karamazov, "If there is no God, everything is permitted," it is also very different in form and effect.  Whereas Dostoyevsky was making a point about the necessity of God for formulating sound and consistent moral judgments, Dowlatabadi is making one about the worth of the human being.  If someone thinks that he is nothing, if someone has been convinced, be it by the circumstances of his life or the observations of others, that he has no worth or value, then it follows that it does not matter what he does or does not do:  he's useless, anyway.  Who cares?
     This is a recipe for human destruction.  People who think they are nothing and conclude that therefore it does not matter what they do are people who inhabit the darkest corners of human history.  People who have decided it doesn't matter what they do are people who have no compunction about treating other people as nothing, too.  It is the stuff of the worst of human pain and tragedy.  It leaves us with a world in which good is bad and bad is good, for nothing matters anyway.  We are nothing.
     Unless, to draw a page from Dostoyevsky and many others, there is a God.  If there is a God (and there is), we can know that we have purpose, and that we are meaningful, inherently meaningful.  We are meaningful because of who we are, and as we are, nothing more, nothing less.  We are the image of God, created by him with lasting meaning and purpose.  How then can we be nothing?  And how then can we see others as the same?
     Don't think that you are nothing, for you will treat others as nothing.  Instead, believe that you are something, something inordinately wonderful and special:  you are the creation of God.