Amerika

When we last checked in on nihilism, we had a working definition as follows:

Nihilism refrains from affirming the belief in universal values, truths, and communications.

Since that time, the definition has expanded to the following:

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

In essence, this has traditionalist and postmodern components.

The traditionalist component involves the golden chain of being: there is a hierarchy to nature, learning is esoteric and determined by that hierarchy, and so none of us see the same world. Our consciousnesses might as well be worlds in themselves, and only the disciplined, bloody-minded, and highly intelligent will see much of what is real.

To the rest, it will be invisible and, thanks to The Dunning-Kruger Effect, they will not only be unable to perceive it but will consider it nonsense and be irritated, angered, and offended by it. Those who cannot perceive much of reality become anti-realistic like Leftists and dualists.

The postmodern component acknowledges that each of us winds a path through the possible experiences of reality, and if we do not have prior encounters, we may have a different angle on what is in front of us. Somewhere in the combination of those angles is something closer to an actual realistic assessment, but no individual can see all perspectives.

Nihilism rejects the idea of the Word and the Law.

The Word is religion from the Age of Symbolism encoded in written form. It is assumed that all will read and interpret that in the same way, therefore it can bind them, but in reality people can barely understand even the simplest laws and observations the same way across a group.

The Bell Curve is real, and so is the concept of destiny. We each take different paths to the same destination in different degrees according to our place in the hierarchy. To believe otherwise is hubris, a form of individualism, narcissism, egotism, selfishness, or solipsism.

Where the Word encodes religion, the Law encodes behaviors, and hopes to make people behave by using a means-over-ends logic that prohibits bad behaviors not bad intents. All this does is teach the bad how to imitate the good and hide their bad deeds out of sight.

The Law and the Word in fact are both means-over-ends, since they hope to use a tool (language) to substitute for the realm of Darwinism, which holds that some people are born with fully constituted minds and therefore, have the right intentions; others are broken and fall into pathological behaviors because of their genetics and biology.

Nihilism also rejects the idea that the world “is” as you see it or want it to be.

No one can perceive the thing-in-itself of the world; we are all seeing it through our reactions to it, filtered through our IQs, memories, experiences, abilities, aesthetic inclinations, behavioral tendencies, and personalities.

The world is unknown to us, and saying that “whatever you perceive is true” implies that this perception is the whole of what is real, which is obviously false. Whatever you perceive may be partially true, but reality exists out there outside of human brains, and it operates consistently but some are better at analyzing its tendencies than others.

Nihilism is neither a happy hippie philosophy nor a furious fascist one, but incorporates elements of both.

From the hippie side, it affirms that we each take different paths to roughly the same destination, and that there is validity and importance in all perspectives, although each is wrong to a degree and accuracy follows the bell curve, with a small group on the far-right side being able to see more than the rest.

Its furious fascist elements consist of recognition of Darwinism, namely that “some are born to sweet delight, and some are born to the endless night.” There are biologically/genetically broken people, and any society that wishes to rise will remove them diligently, even if they have not been caught committing a serious crime.

But most of all, nihilism rejects the idea of humans as being at the top of the hierarchy of nature. We are animals with different perspectives, some more accurate than others, but all wandering in a darkened forest of mystery. To that end, we must avoid false beliefs and content ourselves with the handful of widely-applicable truths we can actually know.

Tags: active nihilism, axiological nihilism, epistemological nihilism, nihilism, realism, skepticism