The Savage Logic of Nihilism

This title is a fallacy. Nihilism is an assault on reason and as a consequence, doesn't follow logic. It is however not uncommon - indeed tradition - to present violations against logic as just another form of reason. Much like Hegel's anti-philosophy - which considers contradictions a sign that 'something interesting is going on' - was presented as the New Reason. We've been mentally impaired ever since.

Anti-modern' thought' is filled to the brim with Orwellian oxymora: 'true freedom' through the state, society as manifestation of 'real self' and the source of 'pure ethics'? Whatever next? A secular, Muslim broadcasting association? (in Dutch)

The politically correct thought police is enforcing the rules of Pragmatism, a branch of relativist philosophy that should not to be confused with 'the practical'. Key here is the expedient. Everything else is subordinate: the end justifies the means - pick and choose among all possible causality whatever fits your agenda and apply it unilaterally (no need to be consistent, ever).

So when a Finnish knucklehead starts slaughtering his classmates one by one in cold blood, it's not the perpetrator who is at fault, but the morally neutral means he used to commit the crime: handguns (morally neutral, because weapons don't have brains or Free Will).

The narrative (or 'logic') of the Hegel dialectic in Europe runs something like this: the American Republican Party - the gun-toting, Bible-thumbing arch reactionaries, support the Second Amendment; this party belongs to the political Right. Therefore - since we proudly declared for progressivism - our subjective position must be that we are against guns, irrespective of the merits (sub current ... and that goes for hunting (the 'murder of animals') as well ...!).

Enter the British Left's in-house news rag Al Guardian, home to unrepentant Marxists and Al Qaeda apologists: "Finland school massacre brings day of mourning and review of gun laws", subtitled "Prime minister says he is 'very critical' of easy access to handguns after gunman kills 10 at vocational college." It's the gun that did it, not the hand that moved it, goes the new 'logic.'

The Left's approach to crime does the rest: criminal behavior is not the result of Free Will made a bad moral call, but on the contrary, follows from a person's inability to conform to society's arbitrary conventions. Therefore society is at fault, not its 'victim' who is unable - through no fault of his own - to conform to arbitrary social norms (hence the frantic pursuit of genetics which - with gland activity - opens up a whole new field to attribute blame).

Very integrated piece of 'philosophy', is Leftist ideology!

Returning to the Finnish school shoot-out, we suppose this has nothing to so with the nihilist thought processes that lurk at the bottom of the subjectivist pond? Surely third millennium adolescent mass murders are unrelated to anti-modernist champion Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who gave us the organic collective's Common Will; or to Kant's ethics of sacrifice to the collective as man's highest moral achievement?

Nationalism (not to be confused with expressions of patriotism!), Communism, as well as Fascism and National Socialism can all be traced back to these notions: that individual man is Nothing, and pursues non-values in an unknowable universe, that makes a mockery of his being and capacity to reason; the existential trauma that - as the grandfather of postmodernism, Heidegger, put it: life is an absurdity.

After the subversion of Liberalism, we currently witness the deconstruction of Humanism as it is hijacked by the Scions of Nothing. Both have been perverted to the point of becoming their own antithesis. Humanism got divorced from the center principle, human life as an absolute value. For the last couple of decades or so Humanism advocates 'the option of death'. And subjected to the slippery slope that is the fate of all demoralized ideology, the message is now morphing into 'the duty to die'.

Must we be surprised that this is staring us in the face? Go ahead, blame the tools! Embrace environmentalism, the pseudo religion of anti-humanism.


- Filed on Articles in "Life Ethics" -