The Evolution from Value to Non Value

For reasons we shall see shortly many people today have lost track of the meaning of the word 'value'.

It means simply - within an ethical system - something worthy of pursuit and effort to keep it.

In the relativist Marxist dialectic and its frame of ethics, morality became a social construct of the Oppressors - i.e. the bourgeoisie. Middle class values became synonymous with the concept itself.

Like the entire field of ethics came to be defined in accordance with the Kantian ethics system, and 'morals' are understood as limited to sexual behavior, for entire swathes of Westerners 'value' currently means 'suspect middle class decency', usually slightly false and hypocrite. Value became a non value.

Pop culture consists almost entirely of non values, and even anti values. No one pursues health hazards, ugly things, refuse, dilapidated buildings, rags, music as a loose jumble of unrelated sound waves, ditto in literature (word salads), faecal art, urinals, and anything else skatological. In short, that which in real life we need to get away from as soon as possible because it's, well ... worthless -- valueless.

Postmodern art and culture tries to sell us refuse - non values - as if they were a value, something worth pursuing and keeping ... in effect, anti values.

The entire edifice of Left and Right collectivist ethics, is based on a fallacy (not reality as it is, but as it should be, according to their false ideologies) and the subterfuge, that aims to persuade us that what we see in front of us, is an illusion and thus unworthy of pursuit.

The consequence is the upside down, relativist world we live in today: in which our senses are said to be deceiving us and man is thus incapable of knowing anything (epistemological nihilism); black is white from a certain point of view and true (subjectivism); that reality will cease to exist at the moment of our death because it is 'thought that creates reality'.

Much has been said about the parallels of the Weimar Republic in the German interbellum, and the present times. In reference to values this is most certainly true: the same postmodern non and anti values in art and culture, and in society rampant relativism, sexual deviasion and permissiveness, and an obsession with death and the gruesome.

Yesterday Dutch TV aired an interview with a young Muslim woman who was in the Turkish Airlines plane crash at Amsterdam airport this week. The interviewers, who never hesitate to brutally deride and ridicule Christian believers, softly-softly pushed her on her beliefs and the Muslim approach to the afterlife.

She explained that in Islam our earthly life is not something worthy of great pursuit, and that real life, is the afterlife. It is in the unity with Allah that true life begins. While the same thought has certainly crossed the minds of many Jews and Christians, for a very good reason the basic credo has always been the absoluteness of the sanctity of life. This is but one basic aspect why the three faiths of the book are not "all the same".

Any other inference that may be drawn from that premise for the moment aside, it is obvious that to her and her co-religionists death is clearly a value, while life is not. Now, answer the question, why would anyone devise a thought system that makes death a worthy pursuit?

The conclusion is justified that two and half millennia worth of civilization is currently under attack by some form of nihilism, on some level or other: ethically, epistemologically, metaphysically, culturally, ideologically, politically, you name it!

Hampered by idealistic collectivists who are naive enough to have put their money on a happy, post Christian and post racial global cumbaya, and caught in a pincer between on the one hand, nihilistic postmoderns who lost their belief in anything, hell bent on tearing down the rest of humanity with the demise of their morally bankrupt ideals; and on the other hand the Islamic collective of the Ummah that is obsessed and in the throngs of a fanatical death cult.

Boy, are we knee-deep in skatological goo ...