Amerika

Humanity shuttles between two opposites: individualism (narcissism, egotism, solipsism, arrogance, DKE) and holism (realism, transcendence, structure, cosmic consciousness). The former appeals to those for whom something is wrong and life appears likely to blame because it unites self-pity and opportunity.

In order for individualism to take root, however, it must be shared through the magic of equality, which forms a herd of collectivized individualists united on self-pity and pity for the underdog, which causes them to constantly seek out the sick, insane, and self-destructive to raise up as their heroes.

What Nietzsche calls a “slave morality” is more likely a “bourgeois mentality,” since people develop this type of psychopathology when they exist in large groups of a cosmopolitan nature. It does not arise in small towns where people work with their hands or their minds directly. But when jobs and appearances matter, self-pity becomes the norm.

Self-pity exists to justify or rationalize selfishness. If you are a victim, the group owes you, not the other way around, so it pays to be a victim, at least in public. Even better, you are effectively insulated against criticism: you are a victim, not an oppressor, but this means that the world must be divided into that binary.

This clashes with known reality, which does not divide into victim/oppressor, but greater degrees of function versus lesser degrees, with the latter being selected out by natural selection for failing to adapt to the whole of a system, even if it had good SATs or lots of money.

Morality must be realistic or it is suicidal. Those who self-pity reject the realistic, therefore embrace the self-destructive through a contrarian ironist approach that allows them to deny reality so that they can affirm individualism as good, which requires rationalizing failure as success in the Christian and Marxist tradition.

In these belief systems, egalitarianism and dualism, we see runaway symbolism. People select a symbol because it narrows reality and therefore, allows them to rationalize what they want as a subset of what is defined as “good.” Because they rely on this symbol, however, others follow it, and soon the symbol becomes a property.

When the symbol becomes a property, people fight for it, and they advance the symbol at the expense of others and even themselves. The symbol has become more important than the people who created it. Hundreds of millions have died for equality, or even for the cross, without realizing that realistic concerns had been cast aside and replaced by symbolic ones.

Where once nature dominated us, now human illusions do, all of which are based in the idea by the individual that what they want is more important than constraints imposed by reality. These individualists rationalize their desires as “good” in order to argue that nature should be corrected to allow those desires.

This shows us humanity using symbols to control each other. The symbols create false goals like “equality” and “holiness” that then exclude certain methods, and by doing so, force people to choose from the acceptable methods that remain, essentially programming them to think in a manner that is consistent with individualism.

Nihilism operates as an esoteric doorway away from the mental kiosk of human individualism. It says that reality is more important than our judgments about reality, and that our knowledge is advanced by competition, in which those who see more of reality more accurately are more valuable than those who see less.

Consider the updated definition of nihilism that is derived from its first principle, realistic skepticism:

Nihilism declines to accept the belief in universal, absolute, and objective forms of values, truths, and communications.

Instead of allowing humans to create symbols which control us, nihilism declines to accept the boundaries of the symbol and therefore, sees it as an alternative to reality and not a reality in itself. With this, the magic of symbolic control is broken, and with it, the power of socialization.

Something kills human societies when they get successful. Most likely, it is socializing: humans gather in groups, decide that they dislike reality, and create an alternative reality instead, then enforce it through peer pressure. This is usually a response to the means-over-ends approach of jobs and control which value obedience over reality.

When humans socialize, they converge on the lowest common denominator, namely the desire for each person to be a god in his own little world. He wants his desires to take precedence over the whole of reality. Socializing replaces nature as the environment to which humans adapt, and so individualism becomes accepted as real.

A civilization becomes permanent when it finds working methods and repeat them. Those then become a replacement for the goal of adaptation; instead of adaptating to nature (ends-over-means) it adapts to methods (means-over-ends) and this causes ironist contrarianism to erupt because the methods are more powerful than individuals.

This constant state of rebellion relates to the Dunning-Kruger Effect because once a mentality of rebellion sets in, this empowers the least competent people to appear the most radical and liberating because they are the most outspoken. Society begins inverting itself after that.

The process takes centuries but does immense psychological damage. Once people no longer possess the belief that their society is heading in an upward direction, they become fatalistic, and stop trying to reverse the decay. Nihilism provides an antidote to fatalism by separating reality from human opinions about reality.

As written long ago, nihilism resembles an esoteric ritual of separating the analytical and creative mind from the groupthink of socialization and the reliance on a filtered list of methods of approved thought which then shapes us toward fatalism:

To get to this stage, however, one must first undergo the cleansing rite of nihilism, by which all “meaning” as told to us by others or “seeming” to us by physicality, is removed. Sex is not what gives meaning to life; the relationship between the two is what does, as pleasure is transient and cannot by itself hold off pain (indeed, as any thinking pothead can tell you, even the absolute bliss of being gloriously stoned loses its luster over time, as the agenda never changes).

In doing so, nihilism tackles the most persistent problem of human consciousness: relativity. We know hot because cold exists, but without those opposites, neither would make sense. We only know life by death. We can only figure out what is “good” when we see what is “bad.”

Almost all human errors originate in synedoche, or allowing a part to represent the whole, specifically the sympathetic fallacy where we assume that events outside of our minds are caused by our inner events. The sky is not overcast because you are depressed; you are depressed because the sky is overcast.

Humans routinely confuse instance and essence in this way. We see our instance, which is the world we perceive and our needs, as being universal, or of the essence of existence itself. This makes us assume that others are extensions of our selves and that they share our exact perception of facts, values, and what is being communicated.

This probably occurs because big-brained creatures like humans get more signal from their own thoughts than from distant events. In our heads, the world is not relativistic, but binary: there is what we like and then everything else. Nihilism helps remove the false binary and restore realism:

By denying value and purpose, nihilism forces us see physical reality as a mechanical process in which our part is small. When we are walking in winter, falling snow appears to be coming toward us, but in reality we are moving forward as it falls.

Humans fear the amoral, logical, and unemotional nature of cause-effect logic because it does not place humans at the center of activity nor inherently act for their preservation. Natural selection and Darwinism terrify us because they remind us that despite our technology, we are still subject to mortality and error.

Our fear of predation transfers to fear of screwing up in front of others or dying young in political or social unrest. We no longer fear the wolf, but the sociopath and the bureaucrat. We fear the group turning to us with scorn or a lack of estimation. If we lose their approval, we may die alone and impoverished.

This creates a society united on victimhood. When everyone is equal, only those who are victims have power, and therefore, each person must find a way to be a victim. A runaway symbol chain has dominated the mindset of the people in that society, and they now reject reality entirely.

That process creates externalized meaning, or powerful symbols of good/bad (or simply yes/no) which rule the lives of people because these symbols must be used to manipulate others. The judgments about reality by humans matter more than reality itself.

This is why nihilists say that there are no objective, absolute, and universal forms of truth, values, or communications. In each head, reality is interpreted differently, and not only are perspectives and abilities different, but the symbolic filter used to understand reality is more dominant than whatever objects it addresses.

To undo the power of external symbolism, one must believe in nothing except reality itself:

In our minds, cause and effect are the same; we use our will to formulate an idea and it is there, in symbolic form. When we take that idea to the world and try to implement it, however, we can estimate how the world will react but we are frequently wrong, and this causes us doubt.

As a result, we like to separate the world from our minds and live in a world created by our minds. In this humanist view, every human is important. Every human emotion is sacred. Every human preference needs to be respected. It is us against the world, trying to assert our projected reality where we can because we fear the lack of human-ness in the world at large.

Nihilism reverses this process. It replaces externalized meaning with two important viewpoints. The first is pragmatism; what matters are the consequences in physical reality, and if there is a spiritual realm, it must operate in parallel with physical reality. The second is preferentialism; instead of trying to “prove” meaning, we pick what appeals to us — and acknowledge that who we are biologically determines what we seek.

As outlook like the above brings philosophy in line with biology: the stronger animals have more accurate perception and tend to choose longer-term solutions. The weaker animals cannot understand the strong and vice-versa. We are animals adapting to reality like any other species, but our method is slightly different.

Realists concern themselves with power and health; they want their tribe to be healthy and powerful because these things lead to prosperity which is the root of successful adaptation in a Darwinian context. That which produces enough food, shelter, water, and warmth will breed more than everything else.

Moralists on the other hand seek to limit power because they fear it. They see only the moment; realists see the long term. To a moralist, power represents a threat and wealth is a form of power, so they oppose both, except for themselves. Rules for thee, and not for me, and all that.

However, to be realistic, we must first remove the bias created by human emotions, self-interest, social impulses, peer pressure, moralistic judgment, feelings, and desire to manipulate each other. This requires taking on a holistic viewpoint that considers all parts of the world outside our heads, and all of their effects.

For this reason we say that nihilism is consequentialist outside preference in the sense that it measures consequences in reality, not consequences in human group judgment or preferences. Nihilism is extreme skeptical realism which recognizes the relativity of the human condition and natural variance in abilities and tendencies.

Even more, it is fully relativistic. Where morality is a binary — “good” versus “evil,” which are universalizations of personal fears such as predation, insufficiency, and betrayal — nihilism rewards efficiency and function on the relative scale of “better” versus “worse” which creates a Bell Curve between awful and great with most in the middle.

Darwinistic nihilism occurs as a direct consequence of this relativistic morality, since in nature, anything which is better than the previous iteration is rewarded:

Nihilism needs no justification. It follows the pattern of nature, which is evolution: successive replacement of previous forms of organization (“order”, “design”) with better ones. There is no moral imperative to do any given act, only a practical one, in that if a proposed design works better even in some small way, those design details can be incorporated into the status quo, thus forcing it to the next level of evolution.

Humans fear a relativistic morality because it does not have humans at its center. In a relativistic world, if the bear is stronger or faster, it eats and the human does not. Humans believe there is a social contract at the heart of agricultural civilization: we all work jobs in exchange for avoiding the possibility of predation.

That requires a morality of pacifism in which no individual interferes with another; this explicitly abolishes not just culture but nature itself, and is called “liberation” by humans who want to escape reality itself. To do that, one must have self-pity, and it seems self-pity is a consequence of the repetitive jobs of agricultural civilization.

The social morality that human groups form by nature is designed to avoid conflict. Instead of having a purpose, it suggests that we ban controversial behaviors independent of their goals, which means we no longer need a purpose, only rules to enforce pacifism and make each individual feel important.

Any who fail to abide by this morality find themselves attacked by the Crowd. Over time this makes the society fully delusional, basically insane, because accepting reality is threatening and instead, an echo chamber forms which reinforces and amplifies the idea of egotistic pacifism. Reality-denial is “good,” it is said.

If you wonder why every permanent agricultural civilization eventually finds DEADS (democracy, equality, atomization, diversity, and socialism) you now know: groups tend toward these things naturally. Humans socializing always move to the Left because this makes individuals “feel” good, safe, and important/relevant.

This means that those of us reading this piece of writing have grown up in a society that is not just in denial of reality, but actively and violently anti-realistic, or opposed to any mention of reality since this threatens its imaginary Utopia of peace, equality, individualism, and tolerance. It hates reality.

To make that situation even semi-functional, it has to control any discipline which deals with reality, which is why it heavily politicizes science, academia, and history by injecting ideology at every level. It cannot accept reality or the need for a goal, since this would clash with its means-over-ends morality of the herd.

Escaping from this echo chamber of propaganda requires discarding all values and re-discovering them from first principles, using the idea of nihilism which says that truths, values, and communications exist in one human mind only, and the rest of us only understand them approximately through gestures and memories:

Nihilism is not an end state, but an initial state, and a discipline that grows as one explores thought. Nihilism is learning to fly.

Humans fear many things about life. They fear being inferior, and they fear predation. They fear failure, and therefore they fear realism. They fear nature, but also each other, so they want to live in “square” societies of chrome, glass, metal, and plastic where everything is equally proportioned and nothing is difficult.

Even more, they fear that life is random. Both religion and ideology address this: they provide a dismal start-state and a euphoric potential end-state, and to get there we engage in something that is both method and goal, namely means-over-ends behaviors according to their moral commandments or zeal for equality.

In reality, life is random in terms of daily events, but has a graceful order that emerges from a statistical or top-down view over time. This means that, frustratingly for humans, our individual lives may end for no reason greater than a slippery rock or bad match in a box of thirty, but that over time, order will prevail over confusion.

We humans fear noticing that we are in the driver’s seat. God/gods are not guiding the events of history. These unfold in a cause-effect relationship that has a certain amount of internal variation, so it is not wholly deterministic. It is up to us to make our situation turn out well, and this terrifies the human.

Darwinism also follows this statistical path. An individual animal may encounter misfortune, sliding into a crevasse and dying, but over time, the smarter animals will survive and outbreed the others. There is no justice in this world. No one cares about any one of us. However, over time, the universe tends toward positive complexity.

If there are gods active in this place, they take a similar statistical view: they push reality toward greater complexity, elegance, efficiency, and relevance. This happens over the course of many events, not one. And so our individual lives are flotsam tossed by the current, not the focus of the scene.

That thought depresses humans, who could instead see it for what it is — a liberation from the need for control and a single standard for everyone — and therefore, save themselves from guilt, shame, and manipulation. To recap, a sensible definition of nihilism rejects all absolutes, universals, and objective “truths”:

A nihilist refuses to accept the assertion that there are absolute, universal, and objective forms of truth, communications, and values.

Nihilists recognize that whenever someone starts talking about absolute, universal, and objective forms of truth, symbols, and morality, it is a manipulation. This person is projecting their personal needs onto the group so that the group will enforce those definitions by punishing those who stray from group unity.

Such a person is engaged in passive-aggressive bullying. They will say something unrealistic, but if you reject it as a bad idea, they will take that as a personal attack on them. Then they can play the victim. This allows them to invoke the Crowd as their personal army of vengeance.

That compels others to simply accept the illusion on pain of having their lives totally disrupted by a horde of delusional, mentally unwell, angry, and alienated people. Obedience is enforced indirectly from fear of the retaliation of the herd.

Nihilists seek to escape this situation by removing the power of symbols. Instead of assuming that symbols control all of us, nihilists acknowledge that we each understand them differently, and therefore have to treat them as manipulations which rely on our brains “filling in” or projecting information where nothing is actually conveyed.

The classic scam: the mark hears a word or symbol and then makes assumptions about what that implies. For example, the used car salesman says that a car has low miles, but does not mention that it was in two floods and three accidents. The mark visualizes a car that has barely been driven, not realizing that he is getting the opposite.

Symbols become runaway obsessions in this way. When we talk about equality, for example, people think of a world in which every person has minimum needs met, but they forget that equality is only “proven” to exist by the existence of equity, or everyone having the same amount of wealth.

Human societies self-destruct in the pursuit of equity, which fails to take into account different inclinations (some trade money for time) and different abilities. Equity amounts to a subsidy for the least productive at the expense of the most productive, and in time, this society consumes itself chasing a symbol with emotional appeal.

In the same way religions talk about afterlives and holy states of being, which causes people to project their own expectations onto those instead of seeing them as being like nature the products of a much bigger system. Human groups unite against those who have risen above, and whatever symbols rationalize and justify this are eternally popular.

Most people are only interested in “reason” and “logic” only insofar as they provide excuses for doing what these average humans wanted to do anyway. A symbol gives them a cover story and through means-over-ends logic, they can remain “innocent” while clinging to some goal other than the natural quest for adaptation and excellence in any civilization.

Nihilism takes the opposite approach, a Promethean quest for knowledge that brings both pain and possibility. Prometheus stole fire, in an inversion of the Garden of Eden myth, in order to bring wisdom to humanity, but then suffered for his offense against the gods.

However, reading the mythology, one gets the sense that this was a necessary trade: wisdom for pain. At least, this is how we learn generally, and so the myth rings true with history and personal experience. As a larger point, it affirms what a Promethean Nihilist believes: life is suffering anyway, so make that suffering significant by trading it for wisdom.

If nihilism has a root in realist skepticism, it arises from the fact that nature is consistent. The same action begets the same response, every time, just like with a machine or computer (unless there is a glitch, but only neurotics thrive on “exceptions” not strengthening the rule).

We who are of a Promethean nature tend to also be Faustians who embrace struggle against luxury, contentment, herd illusion, and pleasant emotions in order to achieve greatness not by avoiding things (means-over-ends) but by striving toward yet-uncreated goals of a transcendent nature (ends-over-means).

As nihilists of a Promethean and Faustian outlook, we recognize that truths, values, and communications only exist in individual human minds. We can point toward them with gestures, but all knowledge is esoteric, or dependent on the qualities of the perceiver, his experience, and his personality including “gumption” or degree of canny dedication to understanding his world.

For that reason, we decline to believe in absolute, universal, and objective forms of truths, values, and communications. “There are no facts, only interpretations” paraphrases Fred Nietzsche but also expresses our viewpoint; critics say that stating that there are no “absolute, universal, and objective forms of truths, values, and communications” is itself an attempt at universal, absolute, and objective truth.

However, they focus too much on the idea of “truth” and not enough on the idea of “universal.” Consider this:

“There are no universal truths” does not have to be universal; it merely needs to disprove one case to shatter universality.

If there is one case where a truth is not universal, then the idea of truth as universal falls. This is not an exception, but an inversion of the assertion of an exception, namely that because 2+2=4 seems universal, all knowledge can be (and even “2+2=4” means different things to different minds). The Promethean recognizes universality is impossible.

This arises from our understanding of the transactional nature of wisdom. It is bought with pain; some can understand it, but just like not all humans can make fire, it is only relevant and meaning to those ready to understand it, and only those with natural innate abilities to do so can make sense of it. This too is esotericism.

In the longest calculus, the myth of Prometheus is esotericism explained: each of us must buy wisdom with pain, even if just of painful experience, and each goes only as far as he can. A Promethean nihilist rejects more than universal truths; he rejects the idea that there is any universal or “shared” experience.

All we have are symbols, and those like golden idols have no master. They like our tools can become our masters through means-over-ends logic, and like false gods, can lead us to self-destruction, until on the darkened horizon a new Prometheus appears, bringing fire and knowledge of our new possibilities and responsibilities in possessing it.

Tags: luciferianism, nihilism, paganism, promethean nihilism, prometheanism