The Obverse Observer (Nihilism and beyond) serves to explain issues and elements of nihilism only summarized or missed entirely elsewhere in the CounterOrder.

Nihilism and Race

Nihilism does not uphold race as a value any more than it tells us one culture is arbitrarily better than another. We’re all biological entities built with genetic code and then defined and refined through our intellectual capacities and our remarkable ability to adapt, overcome, and prosper. Much of this success is due to the fact that humans are mentally malleable beings whose rise to the top of the food-chain has been a direct result of adopting new ideas and developing new tools and technology.

Race is a subset of species, sometimes referred to as a sub-species, and a species is defined as a group that can reproduce together. Organisms within a species group, like races, can reproduce together. Human races are relatively new creations, formed under the intense pressures of natural selection in the harsh environment of the last ice-age. Because races can intermix they will, it can’t be wrong in an evolutionary sense because it’s biologically and physically possible. The only limitation is geography and the speed of travel, that’s why human races have been preserved in many parts of the world. However, as everyone can tell these limitations of space and distance no longer hold true. Intermixing is what normally happens when separate populations come into contact; the only remarkable difference today is the scale of the event. Whereas in the past it was only a few individuals, for instance the European conquistadors that explored Central and South America centuries ago, now it’s entire populations. [1]

Because many of the physically characteristic traits of specific races are recessive genes, blue eyes and blonde hair for example, they will no longer show up in the superficial attributes of the hybrid population except in rare cases. This doesn’t necessarily mean that recessive genes no longer exist at all and go extinct; in fact since the goal of a gene is to spread as widely as possible they can actually gain from this. This demonstrates the very complex process of conflict and interaction occurring on the genetic level, far beyond what we are aware of at our own macroscopic scale.

We naturally grow and develop through continual interaction and synthesis

As even a cursory study of biology in the natural environment indicates there are a wide variety of strategies for personal and collective success, with success defined as adaptation to make the most of the surrounding environment. The individual freedom to choose your strategy, ideally with serious thought and consideration involved in the decision, is critically important because otherwise the trouble arrives when one despot, or authority group, tries to impose their own values and strategy upon others. This inevitably leads to dictatorship, authoritarian brutality, and eventual social collapse.

Actual events and technological developments have already far outpaced the traditional conceptions of race and reproduction. The real story is far more fascinating anyway when we consider the revolution in biotechnology. At some point in the relatively near future the tools and knowledge of biotechnology will progress to the point where genes, DNA, and the basic elements that build life are as fungible as Lego building blocks. This elemental simplicity is nihilism because it is ineluctable. Eventually we’ll be able to build life and rearrange it as desired. The potential is practically unlimited, for we can become literally whatever we want to be and anything becomes possible - we can cut and paste, edit out diseases, edit in new attributes, and even create entirely new life forms. The real issue is what do we create with these building blocks and what are the consequences?

To ask ‘is this technology good or bad’ is to ask a specious question because the technology is inevitable. We mustn’t hide from it or try and ban what’s physically possible because, like all technology, as fast as one narrow-minded clique rejects it another less conservative group picks it up and gains a massive advantage over the rest. Instead, it’s time to collectively develop the maturity and intellectual development to properly deal with the consequences of our tools. 14.09.08

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” - Charles Darwin

1. For a remarkable look at the genetic history of European explorers, and more, read Adam's Curse, by Bryan Sykes, 2004.

Living in the Past While Blind to the Present: The Folly of Nationalism

It’s very easy to romanticize the distant past precisely because it is beyond our own memory and experience. Traditionalists and nationalists selectively recall an idealized history in order to convince themselves that everything was better way back when, and that if we all just revert to the ‘simpler traditional lifestyle' everything will fit into place and be perfect again. The truth is that the overall well-being of everyone has improved drastically over the past century in direct proportion to technological development. In general even the poorest of the poor are better fed and healthier than they would have been just 100 years ago, and the vast group in the middle now have previously undreamt of capacities at their command. Indeed this fantastic increase in well-being has directly led to the trouble of over-population. So of course we still have significant problems to overcome but our ancestors had much greater problems plaguing their difficult and precarious lives, and with fewer tools at their disposal to solve them! These changes have occurred so rapidly that we have not collectively had time to adapt to them, but that doesn’t mean we cannot or should not adapt to them. Traditionalism is sacrificing the present trying to live in the past, and yearning for a way of life that can’t be regained even if it was desirable.

But even more to the point, the fundamental problem with nationalism is that there are more groups of people calling themselves a nation than there is physical space to create their nations. Israel and Palestine is a classic example of the problem of nationalism. Both groups require land to be called a nation yet their claims overlap, so the contest descends into a pitiless war between two implacably opposed sides that slaughter each other in bloody conflict. Europe fought violent and futile nationalist wars for centuries, millions died on the battlefield, and nothing changed -- they would just start all over again a few years later! These wars weren’t even successful as population growth control! Or look at the Balkans, the former Yugoslavia, for another prime example of the rotten results of nationalism. All fractured into tiny nations that aren’t even viable independent entities, these people have been slaughtering each other over nationalism for hundreds of years and getting nowhere because of it. Nationalism is a recipe for stagnation and decay because you can’t develop and progress when you spend your time killing your neighbors over differences, real or imagined.

Nationalism is a characteristic disease of delusional authoritarian egomaniacs.  Once you head down this path every trivial detail becomes a point of contention and a reason to exclude someone from the ‘nation’, splintering into even more opposing sects and generating an endless series of wars for blood and soil. Nationalists are willing to play because they believe they can win the war and crush the other side once and for all through genocide. Yet victory is never guaranteed. National Socialist Germany was convinced they would win during WWII, yet the Germans ended up narrowly avoiding extinction. And one of the main reasons we have to achieve collective cooperation and not foolish competition is the state of modern weapons technology. In an age of nuclear weapons, and even more hazardous chemical and germ-weapons of mass destruction, warfare no longer threatens the well-being of an isolated nation; it literally threatens the survival of all life on our small planet.

Nationalism is toxic glue for holding a group together; it works for awhile but the disastrous consequences soon outweigh the short-term benefits.

Nationalist ideologues have always been reactionary counter-revolutionaries because they don’t have anything of their own to bring to the table that’s new or widely appealing. Instead they market unrealistic myths from the past while usurping and redirecting contemporary competitive ideologies. This is exactly what Hitler did so effectively against the communist revolution in pre-WWII Germany, he took the appealing elements of revolutionary communism while claiming national ownership over an international movement, added racialism, and then repackaged it all as ‘National Socialism’. The mistake the German people made, and one that cost the lives of millions of them, was not in choosing National Socialism over Communism, it was in investing unchecked power in one individual! This is why, if we allow ourselves to have any kind of government at all, it must not only be under constant scrutiny within a robust system of checks and balances, but even more importantly it must be as impartial and value-neutral as possible. 06.09.08

The Spectrum of Modern Political Philosophy

May 2005

The Problem of ANUS

The cryptic ANUS (American Nihilist Underground Society) website is a critical topic that must be addressed unambiguously because it, and the website Center for Nihilist and Nihilism Studies (CNNS), are creating significant confusion about nihilism, and other important topics too. The ridiculous name and title of ANUS should arouse at least a minor amount of skepticism as to the legitimacy and integrity of the person (or people) behind it. And indeed things are not what they appear. The ANUS website has changed over time but in its current manifestation it purports to promote an unusual mixture of heavy metal music and extreme nationalism packaged as nihilism and marketed to nihilists. It is true that both sites do have material that is thought-provoking and intelligently written, but that is precisely the point. If they were completely useless they would not serve their true purpose. In reality the façade of nihilism is distinctly disingenuous and only serves to mask a contemporary manifestation of what are widely considered to be very racist views.

Analysis of the ANUS and CNNS websites reveals multiple elements that raise considerable doubt as to the honesty and integrity of these productions. A study of the ownership data and Internet links reveals that ANUS and CNNS are not independent productions but are actually part of a large web of connected Internet sites. More importantly when you look at the bigger picture it gives the game away:

anus com (American Nihilist Underground Society), amerika org (Al-Qaeda Appreciation Society of North America), Anarchy net (Anarchism), antihumanism com (Anti-Humanism), burzum com (music of Burzum and writings of Varg Vikernes), churcharson com (church arson), continuity.us (Continuity Movement), corrupt org ("Remaking Modern Society"), fuckcapitalism com (anti-capitalism), fuckchrist com ("Support the Judeo-Christian Holocaust"), genocide org ("genocide, holocaust, and democide studies"), hessian org (The Hessian Studies Society), infoterror com ("Infoterror Internet Activist Promotions, Inc."), ihatejobs com ("I Hate Jobs"), juliusevola com ("Julius Evola: Traditionalist Visionary"), lostwisdom com ("Lost Wisdom"), necrocapitalist org ("Necrocapitalist"), nihil org ("Center for Nihilist and Nihilism Studies"), pan-nationalism org ("Pan-Nationalist Movement"), penttilinkola com ("Pentti Linkola Fansite"), pragmatism us ("Pragmatism Party - Traditional National Democratic Party"), realitynews com ("A look into the real world"), sataniccoalition com ("The Satanic Coalition"), and zionists com ("Kahanist National Zionist Party").

ANUS is exploiting nihilism to promote a derivative white-nationalist position that is commonly considered to be racist. For example, look at the ‘ANUS heroes’ listing (anus.com/zine/heroes/) The first entry is Pentti Linkola, “Linkola advocates dictatorship and eugenics”; then Julius Evola, who is he? “most significantly described as a Radical Traditionalist”, or translated at Wikipedia: “Evola is primarily known for his involvement in Italian Fascist politics”. Also on the list of ANUS’ heroes, Savitri Devi who “emphasized the continuity of ancient Vedic, ancient Greco-Roman, and modern National Socialist thought”.

Further evidence, they self-describe themselves based on “tribes”, and ANUS is loaded with references to race, yet at the same time they claim to reject racism, “I love my African-American friends as well as my "white" friends (really: different Indo-European tribes, including Indians, for whom "white" is a broken general category).” and, “Because we have evolved differently, not only is race-mixing insane, but caste-mixing is insane;…” and, “Further, it's important to realize that racial separation is not an issue by itself, but part of a general program of breeding that includes division by tribe, caste, and finally, eugenics applied to individuals themselves.” From: (anus.com/zine/articles/race/)

ANUS continually uses loaded words like "caste" and "breeding", employs statements that are vehemently opposed to cultural, racial, and caste mixing, all the while promoting nationalism and a very violent elitism that repeatedly threatens to kill those they don’t like. In one article the author viciously attacks ‘white nationalism’, yet the collective tone and rhetoric belies the sincerity of this assault that is, in essence, a calculated effort to legitimize what is actually the same product placed in a different package.

The ‘nihilism’ at ANUS is not just centered on race but it’s blatantly elitist as well. These guys are trying to sell repackaged white-nationalism to nihilists because they know nihilists are willing to entertain attitudes that are considered unacceptable in contemporary culture. So, now it’s apparent why so many people are being confused by the ‘nihilism’ from these websites, because it isn’t nihilism but rather it’s exploiting nihilism in order to reach a secondary conclusion that promotes dictatorship and elitism, among other things.

Regardless of the interpretation, whatever ANUS really is it is not nihilism and should not be mistaken for it.

What’s Going on Here?

The people that promote ANUS and related sites, with Corrupt org at the center of the spider web, are a duplicitous and deceptive lot. And although they typically mask their agenda behind superficially appealing statements these characters are not popular anywhere but in their own little universe and self-manufactured echo-chamber that they endlessly exploit to magnify their importance far beyond actual reality. They use agents as relentless apologists, advertisers, and salesmen to troll message boards, IRC channels, and anywhere else they can gain access to in order to push their agenda, which is simply elitist fascism in an ant-heap society (placing themselves at the top, of course). The reason they are thoroughly reviled is obvious, besides the hard sell, they go out of their way to usurp and hijack others wherever possible. Anyone that gets involved with anyone of them does so at their own risk.

The reason for the deception is clear when the true agenda is revealed. You can’t publicly admit you are racist today because that term has such a strong negative connotation, so you have to alter the message to something more appealing and as a result they target the still widespread aspects of nationalism and xenophobia, sponsoring racial separation and ultra-nationalism. Indeed it’s a poignant testament to just how unacceptable these views and values are within contemporary society that they have to water-down their core beliefs and mask them behind superficially benign phraseology. 05.09.08

Nihilism and Religious Fundamentalism

The interesting article 'US exceptionalism meets Team Jesus' consists of an interview with James Carroll, a former Catholic priest and anti-nihilist, who grew up in the halls of military power in the Pentagon. The interview is certainly worth reading for the revealing discussion on how militant evangelical Christianity has infected the United States military from top to bottom. For instance Carroll points out that, “At the Air Force Academy, "Team Jesus" was one of the nicknames for the football team and one of the most vociferous evangelical Christian proselytizers was the football coach.” And not only that but a screening of Mel Gibson’s fundamentalist slasher flick The Passion of the Christ was force-fed to cadets as an official Air Force event! The consequences of this development aren’t hard to calculate, just consider the current military ‘crusade’ against Muslim Iraq and Afghanistan, but the focus of my criticism here has to do with something else of strategic significance, Carroll’s conflation of nihilism with religious fundamentalism.

Is nihilism the same as religious fundamentalism?

Catholics seem to have a particularly intense dislike for nihilism; remember ‘Nihilism - The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age’ by Fr. Seraphim Rose? Maybe Catholics are better educated than their Protestant counterparts; they must read a lot of Newsweek. Seriously though, whereas Rose equated nihilism with moral decay leading to evil in the 1960s, Carroll in 2007 equates nihilism to religious fundamentalism … leading to evil, of course.

Carroll is an apologist for Christianity. His basic message is, “Don’t surrender religion to the wackos.” But the cynical retort that instantly flashed in my mind when I read that statement was: what’s there to surrender?! The reason Carroll makes this point is fairly clear if you think about it. In order to make his mainstream version of Catholicism safe for all the believers he has to attack everyone on the fringes. But this arbitrary differentiation is the crux of the problem with Carroll’s reasoning. By maintaining that some religion is good and some religion is bad and the difference is based on how the holy scriptures are interpreted it creates a serious schizophrenic contradiction within the belief set. As Brian Flemming realized in his documentary film The God Who Wasn’t There the religious extremists and the fundamentalists are actually the only ones that have any internal consistency in their reasoning precisely because they take the scriptures in their Holy Book literally, instead of trying to modify it to fit it into reality while rationalizing and apologizing for it to the world as the moderates like Carroll try to do. In response to the simple question, if you really believe that your faith in God will get you to heaven and that the world is evil than why not kill yourself and go to heaven now? The fundamentalists follow the scriptural reasoning and reply, yes I will! James Carroll's convoluted response for moderate Catholicism is that our belief is good because we aren’t extremists but their belief is bad because they take it too far by actually believing what’s really written down in the holy book.

A mark of a fundamentalist mindset is that one's own personal virtue is the ultimate value. The American fundamentalist ethos of the Cold War prepared us to destroy the world. In other words, a world absolutely devastated through nuclear war was acceptable as an outcome because it reflected the virtue of our opposition to the evil of communism. Better dead than red. … Better the world destroyed than taken over by communism. It's profoundly nihilistic, which is also one of the marks of the fundamentalist mindset.

Carroll views fundamentalism and nihilism as the same because, in his view, both are apocalypse-seeking. And since religious fundamentalism is just extreme religious belief then extremism is the same as nihilism.

In fact most all religions have a salvation / redemption / change element within their set of beliefs, not just Christianity with its ‘born-again’ mythology. Most religions seek a salvation and redemption through radical change. So to equate salvation with nihilism is simply to state that both seek a change in the current state of events! So what?! Nihilism and fundamentalist religion both seek radical change, even though it is for completely different reasons. Carroll is clearly using nihilism as a pejorative association not a substantive one; the connection is purely illusory. Change is sought by many people, ideologies, and beliefs so without including the reasoning motivating it this just leads to a fraudulent association.

Carroll unintentionally reveals, once again, that the real problem has nothing to do with nihilism or even destruction seeking motivations but it has everything to do with belief and religion, be it fundamentalist or otherwise. Foolish beliefs and unchallenged assumptions pervade an American society that prides itself on ignorance and religious righteousness.

[I]f Americans are upset with the war in Iraq today, it's mainly because it failed. If we could have "ended evil" with this war, it would have been a good thing. It goes back to the joke you began with: [How many neo-cons does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer: Neo-cons don't believe in light bulbs, they declare war on evil and set the house on fire.] if we have to destroy the world in order to purify it of evil, that's all right. It's the key to the apocalyptic mindset that Robert J Lifton has written about so eloquently, in which the destruction of the Earth can be an act of purification. The destruction of Iraq was an act of purification. Even today, look at the rhetoric that's unfolding as we begin to talk about ending the war in Iraq. It's the Iraqis who have failed. They wouldn't yield on their "sectarian" agendas. These people won't get together and form a cohesive government. Now, we're going to let them stew in their own mess. We're going to withdraw from this war because they're not worthy of us.

Willful belief-based ignorance is easily exploited by venal authorities to gain popular support for launching wars based on religious symbolism, all for the most crass and materialistic of reasons like oil, power, and money. In this kind of environment characterized by the moral nose ring Nietzsche warned us about it’s impetrative that, once and for all, we finally cut the strings of belief that corrupt authorities use to bind and manipulate the people like marionette puppets, so the super-rich can't sponsor wars and trigger conflicts for private profit while using their wealth and special influence to insulate themselves from the negative consequences everyone else has to suffer through. 30.09.07

Should I Vote?

Is the glass half full or is it half empty? Deciding whether to vote or not is the same sort of question – the answer depends on your perspective and sentiment at the given moment, but the short answer is yes; let me explain.

Politics is the shit in life you can’t escape from so even though the dominant political parties that almost always win the elections (Democrat & Republican, Labour & Tory, etc.) don’t represent me or my interests, and probably don’t represent you either, the decisions they make in office will still affect us nonetheless. That leaves us in a quandary. If we don’t vote at all they will definitely win the election and can claim a mandate based on the sizeable majority of the votes that put them in office. If we do vote and participate in an election system that is a sham we risk justifying it but can at least exert a small influence upon the outcome while at the same time gaining a legitimate allowance for criticism by virtue of participation. I like to think of voting as renewing my license to criticize the democratic political system.

If you look at the low voter turnout in the average election in the United States, for example, the pseudo-democratic system doesn’t need mass participation to justify itself. So I think to criticize voting as simply supporting a broken system is misleading and perhaps even over-simplified. Everyone is told that what we have now is representative democracy and it’s the greatest thing invented since slice bread so very few people are willing to take the risk of openly criticizing it. Consequently the most practical and rational option is to vote in a way that maximizes the message being conveyed to the elected officials. The two ways to do this are:

• Vote for the main opposition party to create maximum political turmoil and gridlock.

• Vote for a 'third' candidate / minor party that actually represents your interests.

Many have rued the truism that if voting changed anything it would be illegal. But we have to put voting in perspective. Don’t expect radical change to occur but don’t completely discount the impact that your vote can have – it may not be much but it is there if you want to use it. This brings me to another major question.

Why are voters so afraid to vote for a minor party candidate even though the two party duopoly is so obviously corrupt, useless and even outright malevolent towards the public?

I don’t have any exact answers but I think part of it is a generational gap. Voters that are middle aged and over are still convinced that they can elect Party Left or Party Right and solve everything. Conversely, skepticism and cynicism towards the two party duopoly is widespread among youth today.

Another major impediment to seeing what’s really going on is the sports spectator effect – the popular desire to be a part of the winning team  through vicarious association, in this case by voting for the candidate that gets elected. People have to stop thinking about ‘winning’ in the election. Nobody is really winning anything in this system except the candidate that gets their meat-hooks into office and the lobbyists and special interest groups they are funneling the kickbacks too. Voting just to be a vicarious winner, instead of voting for the candidate that really represents you, is about as asinine as you can get, yet that is exactly how many voters behave!

Finally, the people that vote most often are the ones that feel they have something invested in the social and political order and as such they tend to not want it to change radically, or at all, because that could negatively impact their interests. This is why the richer the voter is the more likely they are to vote for a conservative, and vice versa. People that are disenfranchised and disaffected have much less invested in the status quo and thus they typically see no benefit to participating or supporting it and so they don’t vote. Unfortunately this short term self-interest only serves to justify and perpetuate the status quo creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. 11.09.06

The U.S. presidential race, impassioned almost to the point of hysteria, hardly represents healthy democratic impulses.

Americans are encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the political arena. Essentially the election is yet another method of marginalizing the population. A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, "That's politics." But it isn't. It's only a small part of politics.

The population has been carefully excluded from political activity, and not by accident. An enormous amount of work has gone into that disenfranchisement. During the 1960s the outburst of popular participation in democracy terrified sectors of privilege and power, which mounted a fierce countercampaign, taking many forms, until today.

Bush and Kerry can run because they're funded by similar concentrations of private power. Both candidates understand that the election is supposed to stay away from issues. They are creatures of the public relations industry, which keeps the public out of the election process. Their task is to focus attention on the candidate's "qualities," not policies. Is he a leader? A nice guy? Voters end up endorsing an image, not a platform.

The regular vocation of the industries that sell candidates every few years is to sell commodities. Everyone who has turned on a TV set is aware that business devotes enormous efforts to undermine the markets of abstract theory, in which informed consumers make rational choices. An ad does not convey information, as it would in a market system; rather, it relies on deceit and illusions to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices. Much the same methods are used to undermine democracy by keeping the electorate uninformed and mired in delusion. From: Interventions, by Noam Chomsky, pages 98-99, 2007.

Film Review: Flight from Death

Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality (2003) is a documentary that uses stock footage, vague location backdrops (usually cemeteries), and brief interviews with colorful professors you’ve never heard of in schools you didn’t know existed to attempt to answer the inveterate problem of cosmic meaning and human mortality. Although the film subtly presents itself as an independent and objective analysis this is slightly misleading because it actually approaches the issue based on the fringe psychological theories of author and cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. Yeah I never heard of him either. Becker, and thus the film, basically believes that everything humans do is about death denial.

To the credit of the researchers and philosophers behind this effort they have attempted to find quantitative evidence to support their contentions. However the results of their one study conducted on college-age volunteers seems dubious considering that multiple conclusions could still be drawn from the facts. But anyway, Becker and the film conclude that violence and the worst excess’ of human behavior are a product of death anxiety. Religions are personalized death denying illusion. Evil is created by the attempt to form a utopia free from evil.

The answer to all this trouble, and I’m using the actual words from the film, are to practice tolerance and kindness towards others. Further, illusions are necessary and unavoidable so we must therefore strive to create life-sustaining illusions rather than to overcome them. The seemingly obvious fact that this is simply yet another effort to form a utopia free from evil, and is therefore evil, is not addressed. Indeed the film delivered a rather stunning conclusion considering the fairly reasonable intellectual buildup preceding it.

In fact illusions are not necessary; illusions are intentionally manufactured to mask things that people don’t want to perceive. Differences of perception certainly do exist within the realm of human consciousness but that should not be an excuse to disregard the much more considerable common elements, indeed the very common concerns that the film used to construct much of their views! The flaws in Becker’s views are more than benign, they can become a very harmful way of thinking because it leads towards an obsession with physical life extension, as the film mentions. In fact death is just as important as life and most people live too long as it is – that’s a major problem we are just now facing as individuals of the human species are now living longer than ever before in history. The most reasonable answer to draw from Flight from Death is to simply recognize death as an inevitable part of life, free from exaggerated mythology and excess fear.

The film is, in my view, overly philosophical and not materialist enough in approach but it is intellectually compelling nonetheless. Unfortunately the film does not address or offer any explanation for suicide actions, only for the common responses to the violence. Discussion of the topic of suicide is conspicuously absent from the documentary.

I found the film difficult to pay attention to mostly because the topic does not lend itself well to a cinematic format for delivery. The vocal portions are complex enough that it takes effort to interpret what is being said while the video is often showing extraneous stock footage barely related to the narration so it becomes distracting towards the effort to digest the concepts in the film. Note: the subconscious message content (possibly) included in this film has not been rated or reviewed.

As an example of a contrary, materialistic, argument that is at least as intellectually compelling, but probably not any more accurate in a holistic sense, read this one: It's the money, honey by Chan Akya. I've encountered fairly convincing views that human actions are all motivated by a desire for sex; Chan Akya thinks it’s money but the point is it could be sex, death avoidance, money, genes, memes, or something else. Human actions are driven by a multitude of factors, it doesn't have to be only one and it's probably a combination that depends on circumstance as well as historical and cultural influences. 06.01.07

"What makes being a soldier great is the nobility of it — good fighting evil. If you lose that, all this sacrifice is for no good reason."  - Maj. Peter Kilner, West Point. From: Combat stress takes toll, June 14, 2006.

Philosophical versus Political Nihilism, or why can't we all just get along?

When it comes to the realm of action and thought there are two attitudes that characterize a categorical breakdown. One group is convinced that ideas are all that really matters, that theory is of prime importance over substance – this is why it is referred to as philosophy. And then there are those that are convinced practice, substance and action, are what really matter. These two attitudes are what characterize the views of philosophical and political nihilism.

The philosophers don't want to get involved in seeing the notion turned into practice because it fractures all their pretty beliefs and ideas with messy realities and pragmatic compromises. While the practical builders don't like being slowed down by dogma and theories that look nice sitting on a shelf, like a book or a trophy, but can't be integrated into real life. They are aware that without a test the hypothesis is not any more useful than the paper it is written on. Argument between the two is mostly a waste of time because no real ground for compromise exists, for as adamant as the pragmatists will state that the practice is what matters, the theorists will maintain the opposite. Consequently, most of the philosophical nihilists don't want to see nihilism turned into Nihilism because the process is messy, it's dirty and it inevitably ruins many of the cherished notions they hold dear. Far too many of them treat their conception of philosophical nihilism as a dogma that cannot grow and evolve because that means accepting change as well as a past, a present and a future that operates independently outside of them.

For a historical example of this conflict compare Karl Marx to V.I. Lenin. It’s ironic that Marx was so concerned with the struggles and triumphs of human labor but never worked a day of manual labor in his life. In fact his family nearly starved because he wouldn’t get a paying job. His ideas written down had a significant impact upon millions of people, but that impact was largely a result of the efforts of organizers like V.I Lenin. Marx would no doubt have criticized Lenin for corrupting his beautiful theories but nonetheless Lenin turned Marx’s writing into reality.

Another example, a perfect contemporary example, is that of Jeffrey Skilling architect of the new energy trading techniques at Enron incorporated. Skilling was, and still is, a firm believer in the concept of the idea in primacy, that the idea is what really matters not the practice or execution. Skilling came up with a new form of accounting that allowed him to book profits now on the predicted future revenue from his ideas. So in other words if the concept of trading energy futures cannot produce a profit today because it is too new to have an established history but five years from now it could be worth, say, one billion a year, then we can count that profit today on the company books. It’s a new economy after all and don’t the brilliant people deserve to get paid for the brilliant ideas they come up with?! Skilling and others in the top management at Enron thought so. Now several years later, after the multi-billion dollar meltdown of their corporation, Skilling still maintains his complete innocence while on trial for financial fraud so massive it broke records. For a much more detailed explanation of this astounding process watch the documentary Enron: the smartest guys in the room (2005) DVD ², and find out why they didn’t ask why enough.

Please don’t misunderstand my intent. Ideas are important, theory is important too, and it would be fantastic if we all could book revenues on our expected future profits or change the world with just a graduate level philosophical dissertation. But there’s also this other force at work known as practical, functional existence, i.e. reality, and it has a nasty way of devastating anyone foolish enough to ignore it. Nearly all philosophy if adopted literally necessitates the contravention of known reality. Take, for example, the assumption that nihilism rejects all forms of organization and authority. Even if this was an inextricable tenet of nihilism, (it isn’t) such a notion simply can’t be internalized. In fact no human individual or endeavor can survive well or do much of anything without organization. We are social creatures and organization is what we do. That is why the second definition of nihilism is in the dictionary, the one that many of the existential nihilist types either refuse to recognize or simply ignore outright. Not only that, but as hundreds of participants at the Symposium forum and Online Nihilism group demonstrate on a daily basis, one can be a member and a supporter of a group and still hold independent thoughts. Imagine that!

Theory and practice can assist each other but sometimes they simply have to agree to disagree and allow evolution and the testing process to deliver a verdict. 16.04.06

Where’s the Truth?

The primary process under the rubric of nihilism is skepticism, it is to take as little for granted as possible and that includes nihilism itself. Philosophical nihilism is inherently contradictory, for instance to state that ‘no truth exists’ is just as rigid and principled as the more common assertion that a singular truth does exist. Nevertheless some people still try to use one or the other. Both are absurd, although the philosophical nihilist one is more obvious. Now, absurdity can be entertaining and enlightening but only in the way that outdated fad becomes kitsch and is therefore ‘cute’ and collectible. A message is contained within it all but it’s not a facile one. Absurdity really indicates a lack of complete information; absurdity is an error message.

The fact that some people attach so strongly to either one I think demonstrates that an irrational undercurrent runs through human nature. In the case of ‘no truth’ (anti-science) it is part rebellion, part ignorance and part fear: fear of order that might defeat their own beliefs in self-determination, or more specifically the belief in the right to ‘do whatever I want to do’. In the case of the other pole, the ‘one truth’, it’s a wish to have everything taken care of and the belief in a holy deity that controls everything and all blessing will follow from obedience.

Science originate from the ‘one truth’ view and not too surprisingly it generates some intense antagonism in the public because it doesn’t make either group happy, it undercuts free-will and also God. But the ideas behind science are completely sound: to try and find some pattern in the disorder, to try and employ some kind of consistent algorithm to find consistent results. I think the scientific method is the best tool of its kind around, so far, but it has its limits. Mikhail Bakunin once stated, "Between thought and life there is a wide abyss." Science can generate completely accurate and truthful statements but upon application in human society they can fail miserably. Even more, technology often fails even after science succeeds.

Everyone wants to find ‘truth’ but it can’t be found like a search for a singular entity, like some jungle explorer searching for a legendary gold idol. The search for ‘truth’ is the search for a definition. As humans we all start from a very distorted perspective because in order to exist we must value our life but the continuing order of the universe cares not a bit about us one way or the other and suicide changes nothing. But the universe is definitely not irrational; in fact if anything it is maddeningly predictable, at least on the size-scale that we exist at. Humans live by values but the universe does not – it offers possibilities but does not favor one over the other. Ultimately moral right and wrong are products of the ego, after all no one wants to be ‘wrong’ and everyone wants to be ‘right’!

Even amongst the disparity a common element can be found and I think that the natural survival instinct will suffice. It creates an internal sense of true and false but one that is not necessarily transferable to others. Nihilism can state that the overall picture does not create any absolute right and wrong, true or false, but the concept is nonetheless quite significant to the individual. So it could be said that true and false are both absolute and relative at the same time. The interface between all of the viewpoints creates a deceptive complexity; our sense of reality is the interface between all of them perpetually interacting. Indeed trying to find a truth here is an atrocious calculus problem! This is why scientific reduction often fails in deciphering human actions and living reality but adding it all up also proves problematic because it’s never accurate, only an estimate. Truth, at least on the social level, and perhaps a universal level, is statistical. 20.06.04

The Decay of Chinese Culture: Nihilism Goes to China

As any linguist will tell you studying a language can generate significant insights into the nature of the culture and people using that language. In this case I’m referring to the Chinese written language. Whereas western culture and languages are digital and stem from a deconstructive worldview, the eastern languages, particularly Chinese which is the forerunner of most other East Asian languages such as Korean and Japanese, are self-contained and result from a fundamentally holistic worldview. In other words instead of breaking things down in order to understand them, they see things as static without further need for understanding. So it shouldn’t be surprising to find out that Chinese culture is extremely authoritarian – don’t question authority or the Party line – just do what you’re told. The implied duty of every child growing up in this culture is to obey authorities and conform to their expectations.

In Chinese writing the meaning has to be extracted from the relationships between the component symbols, so context is imperative to communicate in any useful manner. This creates a language that appears complex because it relies so heavily on a shared understanding of cultural history to create meaning in the sentence. Chinese also seems ‘poetic’ and ‘mystical’ because it is so fundamentally limited in its ability to convey a concise idea or concept unlike a letter based alphabet that can be used to create an almost infinite array of new words and concepts to communicate new ideas and thoughts.

Because Chinese culture relies so heavily on centralized authorities to dictate orders and policy for the people to obey it creates an inherently temporary situation since it’s based entirely on sycophancy and blind obedience rather than questions, thoughtful criticism, and adaptation to new situations. This is not to say that the Chinese can’t take advantage of an opportunity for after all there are quite a few newly rich entrepreneurs in China today, but it does mean that the Chinese authority system is very quick to usurp the motivation of individual effort in order to maintain its dominance over the country. In fact the communist party in firm control of China today is downright paranoid when it comes to challenges to their power – economic, political or religious. Even a cult as seemingly innocuous as the Falun Gong generates the most repressive and severe police reaction from the Chinese government. The Internet is tightly monitored and censored, just as all the news and information is filtered through the lens of official opinion. Official statistics are created based not on what is really happening but on what the Party wants to see, indeed this is the perfect example of how China is run today and has been for time immemorial – Chinese authorities are motivated and supported in all their endeavors by willful delusion.

This is important to recognize amidst the current hype over the rise of China as an economic, military, and political power. Although the Chinese people themselves have immense potential and can and do express it when given the opportunity, the present Chinese communist (or some say quasi-fascist) government will do everything it can to stop this when it occurs outside officially approved channels. And the Communist Party has no plans to rescind power anytime soon; this is another tenant of Chinese authorities - never give up power and never face reality because criticism is the enemy. China’s grip of world trade is not nearly as solid as it may seem today. There’s nothing that China exports that can’t be made elsewhere and China’s cheap labor is simply a result of government subsidies. Even regardless of this the massive overproduction going on in China today is flooding world markets and will eventually initiate a deflationary spiral downward in price and profit.

So even though Chinese culture has thousands of years of history that compel obedience to official rules and precepts and negates independent thought, the Chinese people nonetheless remain thoroughly self-centered and as the flow of information leaks into their closed society new ideas are changing their attitudes. Things in China today are beginning to change because the social hypocrisy has become unsustainable. The distance between the Party’s version of truth and the truth of actual reality is a rapidly widening rift fracturing Chinese culture.

Young people in China don’t believe in the Communist Party, they don’t believe in their vaunted leaders and their self-congratulatory charades, and increasingly they don’t buy into the archaic culture and its values that are continually claimed so superior to the rest of the planet. Many of them still remain ardent nationalists though and this is one tool the Central Party can still use to whip up enthusiasm for their projects and control the populace by directing their boiling anger over internal problems against foreigners. Nationalism is one of the last vestiges holding a broken China together but a corrupt regime can’t exploit that sentiment forever. All the old gods in China are dead or dying, communism killed religion and now communism is dying too. A rising undercurrent of nihilism exists in China today, an inevitable result of blatant social hypocrisy, egregious government repression, abuse, and authority’s attempts to control the minds and bodies of their subjects. 01.05.04 & 17.11.08

Total Extremes – A Thought Experiment in Nihilism

To understand the middle it helps to study the extremes. This being the case just what do the extremes look like on a universal scale? It seems that the two extreme poles are difficult to describe because they bear no resemblance to anything we experience on a daily basis or indeed anything in the known universe, they are theoretical but extremely simple constructions.

One. The first pole is that of complete sameness in everything. Imagine looking at a metal plate painted white and perfectly smooth – try to distinguish anything from anything else – you can’t. This universe is a one, no values can be formed here because everything is just one-thing and it’s all the same so distance, time, all values used to describe it are completely inapplicable. In this realm of the singularity the individual is useless or more accurately, just impossible.

Nihilism, in the philosophical sense, is applicable in the singularity universe because no values can be employed to describe anything inside it and no choices can even be made, indeed everything here is completely frozen, static, timeless.

Infinite. The opposite extreme is one where everything is different from everything else and no order or pattern can ever be discerned or extrapolated – it is pure chaos. In this universe forming values would be possible, indeed any action would be possible, but at the same time completely useless. In other words if you eat a sandwich today you might feel full, but tomorrow if you eat a sandwich it might make you feel hungry. Values are useless in a chaotic realm because consequence doesn’t follow action on a consistent basis so any action taken now to serve a single purpose may or may not generate the same result later. The individual here can act but they are powerless nonetheless because they cannot predict or generate any consistent results. This is a bit of a cheat for purposes of visualization because in the chaotic universe no individual could exist since stable form requires a consistent pattern. It's interesting to consider that even this chaos can still be rationally described (because of the simple physical laws governing it).

Obviously we exist in a universe that is far removed from either extreme, convenient for us because we wouldn’t be around otherwise. Our universe is somewhere on a scale between the two extreme poles, it is finite and thus a distinct and discrete range of options exists. Anytime a limited range of options exists so does the necessity of choosing, some options will be better than others but here the trick is determining that value. This is the universe we live in, one of order and often murky but still discernable patterns. Our universe is consistent but large enough to still feature unknowns and limitations beyond which are impossible to perceive, generating a small but still significant amount of randomness.

It’s quite possible that both extremes are attached to the life cycle of our own universe. We can extrapolate the past by rewinding the detected expansion of the universe to a singularity (the sameness of one) and possibly predict the future as a progression to chaos, just random energy.

Although in this universe it is possible to have a functional value system it may not be a sound one! What matters is the criteria used, the perspective – this is a universe created from the product of multiple, complex interactions and relationships. Our present universe is one of relative values overlaid on a substratum of inviolate physical rules. From an objective and cosmological perspective no set of adopted values is any better than the other since none can change the ultimate confinement of time and space within the universe – the original existential dilemma.

Reduction to the simplest form generates clarity but one that is often misleading because of its distance from the everyday complexity we actually experience. Practical reality is subjective, it dictates a continual need to judge, act and react. So just as entropy is so often misunderstood to mean chaos cannot be avoided, so is everyday life an exercise in erroneous contradictions. The existential dilemma can be broken because human life is not infinite but highly proscribed – this is what creates order out of the disorder. The 2nd law of Thermodynamics which defines entropy is not an absolute but merely a construct of averages, it merely states the most likely outcome; allowances exist for localized and temporary contradictions of entropy. Not only that but the equations only pertain to closed systems, Earth for instance is an open system because it gains energy, mostly from the sun. We actually live in a very dynamic setting where things really do change. Order can and does emerge from chaos, but it's an order that needs to be questioned for even the values behind it can be changed. Actually, if I had any point when I started writing this I can’t remember it, but that one works as well as any. 07.01.04

Acting Out

As a kid in school I was so fantastically bored the only way I could survive was to escape into my own mind and imagination. In middle school, while on the interminable bus rides I was always stuck on, I would imagine blowing things up with my anti-matter gun. I’d build and perfect the gun in my mind and watch the destruction. In elementary school I wrote and illustrated a little book based on the ‘Mr. Men’ book series; the character I created was called Mr. Destruction.

Not surprisingly my teachers were always on my case and this was before the panic and fear today with the school shootings. If I were a kid in school today I’d probably have my own dedicated security camera. But it was quite unnecessary and actually had the opposite effect because it just heightened the sense of antagonism between authority and me. I get twitchy thinking about what a kid like me has to go through in public school today.

It seemed like anytime I expressed myself in a genuine way I ended up in a parent-teacher conference! I got the message real fast, act yourself and get punished. But in retrospect I don’t think my case is really all that unusual. This learned disingenuousness is widespread. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance, the act of holding two contradictory beliefs at once, and it’s pervasive as it is insidious in modern culture. This is the root of schizophrenia because the mind literally develops a schism, it's split in two and reality assumes two forms - the part we know is true and the part we have to act like it is true. So as a child grows up they continually want to act in an instinctive and internally motivated way but can’t because morality and culture constrain them. When compelled to obey flawed beliefs and wayward ideologies, anger, resentment and even insanity will ensue. The social psychologist John Dewey was on to this and his conclusions actually got him called a nihilist.

So people are suppressed and stifled all the time, they have to release but don’t know how; they beat up their girlfriend or yell at family or just kill themselves slowly with a TV remote and a beer, or fast with a bullet and a gun. This is one of the main reasons behind recreational drug use – it’s a pathetic way of stripping off that shell and being free to act as we really want to and the drug effects are used as an excuse so it becomes socially tolerable behavior. I once made a not-so-funny cartoon about this called the Marijuana Effect. Drug abuse increases, senseless violence increases, anger and hostility increase, all in conjunction with the rising levels of hypocrisy, double standards and forced behavior patterns within society. The coercion of conformity weighs down on everyone like a ton of bricks: you have to act this way, you have to look like this, you have to want these products, over and over and over until people crack, they blow up. Then the pundits wonder aloud ‘how could this happen, we need tougher penalties!’ Or ‘why does everything seems so phony and shallow in society; we need more old time religion!’

Shakespeare once wrote (As You Like It , II, vii, 139-143), "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” A playwright would say something like that; still the sentiment has a significant amount of truth to it. Pretending you are something that you're really not is a human capacity, it allows for greater depth of character. But when it is forced rather than just play it assumes a very sinister role in human development. The fear of being controlled and losing your mind are two themes that recur throughout contemporary literature and movies and other forms of discussion. In fact the storyline of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of the most used and repeated themes in all of cinema; the human mind is split and behavior follows suit. Eventually the schizophrenia gets so severe that a person loses any ability to distinguish between what they’re pretending to be and what they really are (or were). So, much like an actor that does a single role so much that they become the character rather than themselves, the line is not just blurred but erased in the mind and one finds that they really have been taken over; they have lost themselves only to become a clone and a slave to something they don’t even understand. They’ve lost all freedom and their freewill has been usurped. Life becomes worse than a living hell because once original identity is lost no viable way exists to regain it!

Sometimes the chokehold of oppression is so strong that the only outlet is a mass hysteria whereby individual suffering is projected into collective behavior. These epidemics of insanity are more common than might be thought; Nietzsche mentions some of them in Genealogy of Morals, III, #21. Any culture, even archaic ones, are potentially affected by mass insanity so long as they remain rigid and incapable of accommodating human behavior driven by innate desires or individual, independent expression.

The bottom line is that in order to be mentally healthy everyone must have two things. First they must have at least part of their identity set apart from everyone and everything else around them; the freedom of self-definition is crucial to human mental health. We all have to have at least a corner where we don’t have to pretend, where we don’t have to lie, where we don’t have to always act in the ‘appropriate’ way because without it we’re slaves. Second, a person must have some control over their physical surroundings as Maria Montessori very wisely surmised. But this is just a derivative of the mental independence already described for the mind reaches outwards; human behavior crafts the outside to reflect the inside. 19.12.03

"All human victories, all human progress, stand upon the inner force." - Maria Montessori

Existence is the Cruelest Joke

Life is a diversion from the inevitable ending, ideally in a constructive way but often not. After all, isn't it ironic that the more free time we have the more we try to escape it?! Everything beyond survival consists of the search for escape; collecting money or toys, mindless entertainment, drugs, etc. Artist Ed Kienholz called a bar a ”sad place, a place full of strangers who are killing time, postponing the idea they are going to die." That pretty much sums it up.

Boredom is Hell

Nietzsche saw meaning through the continual process of valuing; an intriguing notion. However since 'good' and 'bad' can only really be applied retroactively it would seem to be a faulty one for guidance. I have a sneaking suspicion the insects and Fascists are right on one thing: life is just about doing things, even regardless of the point or value of that action. Simply doing things together creates community and camaraderie, it's not complicated! Life is action, death is inaction.

Peace is Non-Being

There is no such thing as nothingness, meaning that the abstract concept of nothingness is a religious (primarily Judaic/Christian) fantasy, for all absence is relative. Something will always exist in some form in some place. Non-being is another issue; once you’re gone you’re gone forever but parts of you can remain physically through genetic continuity and memetically through fame and ideas.

Forcing the Creeping Inevitable

All existence is struggle, life is war and peace is death; suicide is just getting there prematurely. Not considering the act of dying indicates a lack of consideration for the process of living. So, to all those who've sought peace, even bliss, in non-being - this glass is for you. 14.10.03

Downward Spiral America

Anti-American sentiment is on the rise worldwide, a predictable and understandable product of federal government actions and rampant cultural misunderstandings. The way in which America functions is something Americans themselves are often in the dark about because they have no other references, and outside audiences have a difficult time figuring out just who is in charge and what the motives are because they use a traditional domestic template to understand a unique foreign occurrence.

America is a vastly misunderstood paradox for many reasons, mostly because of media distortions but also simple cultural misunderstandings. I think this is a bit tough to adequately convey to external audiences and perhaps explains much of the antipathy towards American society, but we have no core constituencies. All the power, all the resources are divided up according to who has the greatest influence at present within the spoils process. Conversely the European system for example is much more academic, much more let's be nice and we can agree upon a method of making everyone happy, the socialist model has immense public appeal. But there you have a core interest, a consistent, singular culture and ethnicity. Hell, even Mexico has this. Everybody understands what to expect in Mexico, the culture, the people, etc. But what is America?! It's Mexico on this block, it's Greece on that block, it's China on that block...

Consequently revolution and direct social action is viewed in radically different ways between America and the rest of the world. In Europe these people are usually seen as either communist agitators or fascist thugs both of which want to take over the government so they can tell others what to do. Most Americans couldn't care less about the damn government, they're concerned with their own interests. Europeans see that aggression and interpret it to mean "believe what I do or I beat you up". In America this process isn't for fun, this is for survival. We can't kick back and collect unemployment for years like some European welfare state, if we get sick or injured there is no health care, and the ones with jobs do 40,50,60 hour work weeks not 35. If you want anything here you have to fight for it and all you get is what you can take. This isn't a demo-cracy it's a mob-ocracy! Welcome to the Balkanized America 2002.

Community is destroyed and undermined by good intentions and flawed planning, zoning laws, inconsistent building regulations, layers and layers of government all trying to regulate a huge country of vastly disparate norms, cultures and standards. Federal and state policies carve everything up into districts creating ghettos and ethnic enclaves coupled with the rise of commercial professionalism and the erosion of traditional private and informal social ties, wreak havoc with community and connections. This is America turned fully into a business and not a nation. Asian gangs, skinheads, crips, bloods, I mean I don't like gangs but I can completely understand the reasoning driving people into them. They're trying to protect themselves, their friends and their territory. The structure of U$ politics and how resources are apportioned creates this mess because it doesn't address their needs. It gives them no jobs, police harassment, discrimination, and lip service to their deeply rooted problems. Then wages a narco-war against it's own people and whines about drug abuse. No shit these people are selling drugs, what the hell else can they do for income?

Today we've got middle-aged people reaching retirement but instead of the pensions system their parents had they have stock market portfolios. The stock market has crashed and now they can't retire. The generation of my parents will be working until they die because they have no money. This means people my age can't get jobs, can't break into the marketplace and start a career because all the open slots are filled.

We've got a 'Social Security' system that is nothing but a sick joke and everyone knows it will be gone by the time my generation reaches that age but we've still got to pay a big chunk of our wages into it! We know this because we see how the resources are funneled off, we see how the government steals from it's own and how they do the exact same it now accuses private corporations of doing - cooking the books, lying about income, and defrauding customers. Back during the Clinton years, magically the budget went from deficit to surplus because of a cute little accounting trick, counting Social Security money as income even though it has to be paid out again later!

If you wait on your ass here the avalanche will bury you. One has to be an activist here, you wait in one place long enough and you're dead meat. So to survive one has to fight for what you need and the bigger you are the more influence you have and the better your slice of the pie so to speak. It's an ominous commentary on society that the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) is the largest interest group in the U$A now. It will only get bigger as the population gets older. Leftists like to talk about 'unity,' 'solidarity' and similar ludicrous fictions. How can we have unity when everything you get is at my expense? One can't co-opt this type of a system, a system where equilibrium is maintained by the frantic distribution of dwindling resources amongst competing factions, it can only be exploited until it collapses. 24.07.02  [Reprint from Holology]

How many killed by the Church?


How many killed by nihilism?

Any questions?

Pitfalls of Philosophical Nihilism

To take a position called 'nihilism' and proceed to make such bald statements as 'nothing is real' or 'nothing can be known' defeats the proponent as soon as they start. After all, how can one assert that 'nothing can be known' without some means of knowing that statement to be true?! This is stillborn philosophy.

In this nebula of philosophical nihilism, meaning becomes absurd through a willful ignorance, a manufactured mono-pole reality of idealistic constructs with no bearing on real life. False absolutes only mislead rather than edify. A steady diet of air or rhetoric they'll both starve you to death with the same rapidity. Reality and the meaning extracted from it are relatives not absolutes.

Pitfalls of Universality

Another flaw of this idealistic, philosophical nihilism is that of universality. If nothing is the same or capable of being compared then it leads to an inability to form any conclusions or predictions because everything is unique and totally different. Noted crackpot Charles Fort wrote on this view in his Book of The Damned; but try proving it! Some have gone to the opposite extreme and concluded that everything is the same, a basically equivalent statement. Electrons for instance are the same no matter where we find them. Certainly given modern research the 'everything is the same' conclusion has more weight to it. But ultimately neither one is adequate because both are misleading, unreal perspectives; not to mention the fact these distinctions are based upon artificial and usually arbitrary categorizations. Nihilism on a solid basis has to be beyond this, it has to be deeper.

The 'universalist' position is easily demolished, just look at a pair of dice. All dice are (meant to be) exactly the same but take two and roll them; the part that concerns us is not that we have two of the same dice but that we have two numbers and a relation between the two. Differences can occur from a combination of similar elements.

The universalists have used nihilism to break it down but missed the message in the fragments. We have to shift perspectives, universality misses the point for it's not what separate entities are in themselves it's what's between them that matters. It's the relationships and the interactions that form meaning and the substance we deal with on a daily basis. 15.08.03

UFO - Alien Salvation

Nihilism is reduction as an action - and a powerful action it is. By breaking things down we can gain a sense of what works and what doesn't, what's faith-based and what's self-evident, and eventually even get a grasp on what exists independently of the human mind and what is merely an illusionary product of it. Today let's try the colorful issue of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO's). UFO's are real but only in the sense that unexplained natural occurrences have been recorded and magnified by the forces of human imagination into becoming extraordinary events.

Limits of Human Perception

TThe range of our human senses is very proscribed but generally within that range quite sensitive and accurate, but only within the limits of common occurrences. Any unusual event, especially brief ones, are inherently riddled with errors because the mind connected to the senses, such as vision and hearing, have to do two very difficult things - quickly detect a sensation and then make a judgment as to what it is. The most critical factor is determining just what we saw or heard, etc. We always jump to conclusions in this sort of case even if they are wildly wrong because it is the safe thing to do. Nothing is more dangerous, at least from a psychological perspective, than a giant strange unknown that can't be categorized, it is just too scary. It's much simpler to put an unusual event into a context we are familiar with and then just ignore alternative views afterwards.

Further, our determination of the event is always limited by what we're already aware of because obviously we cannot relate to something we've never encountered before or have no previous experience with. This is why observers always employ the lexicon they are familiar with in describing chance encounters. If they see a disc shaped object it becomes a flying saucer. If they see a bright glowing object it becomes an alien craft rather than say the very bright planet Venus because more people are familiar with UFO's as spaceships than they are with typical astronomical events. If an astronomer, someone who studies the above for a living, sees an unusual sky event they will probably label it a meteor or a satellite but if the average person sees the same thing they 'know' it is something more fantastic. The general public is much more familiar with imaginary details of space aliens than with scientifically categorized phenomena, consequently the general consensus becomes one of attributing intelligent extraterrestrial with these events.

Too Fast to Figure Out?

The short duration of UFO sightings is another serious problem in making accurate determinations as to their origins. Any sudden event, even the most mundane, poses serious challenges to the human mind in comprehension. Police know this effect well because they interview witnesses to sudden crimes, like a purse-snatching, and the witnesses are notorious for imagining details that can be proven to never have been present even though they will swear they 'saw a gun' or 'the crook was black' etc. This is because the human mind only gets a portion of the whole picture through the limitations of the senses and is forced to compensate and fill in the blanks using pre-existing prejudices and judgments. Similarly, police lineups to identify the culprit are useless in court without corroborating evidence. Try any optical illusion like in a puzzle book and you'll realize how easy it is to be fooled by the limitations of human vision.

Issues of perspective also impose limitations upon what can be accurately detected with the naked eye. For instance, it is very difficult to gauge depth and thus relative size of an object placed against a background without any distinguishing features, such as the sky; an ejected, flying hubcap can appear to be a giant silvery craft. Similarly judgments of an objects speed are equally misleading against indistinct backgrounds; a passing airplane in the blackness of night could appear to be a distant, speeding spaceship. These perceptual limitations are a key factor in both debunking the supposed alien associations with extraordinary events and at the same time understanding why so many people are adamant in such assertions. Any picture or view using only one sense cannot be relied on to be what it appears, indeed as any simple optical illusion will testify seeing may be believing but it's only believing in a self-created fiction! The substantive determination of any unusual event based solely on one sense or slice of the electromagnetic spectrum such as that from visible wavelength light, is essentially meaningless.

Visually judging the true size of an object can be tricky. Which figure is tallest? More accurately, which figure appears tallest!?

This is why still photographs of UFO's or indeed any controversial phenomenon proves absolutely nothing even without the fact it can be easily manipulated electronically or photographically. And even less useful is personal testimony since, as we've already figured out by now, people are very easily fooled; this is especially true when they are influenced by large groups due to the power of suggestion and of course the standard limitations of the human senses and the human mind to interpret it all.

Multi-Spectral is Mandatory

Any unusual phenomenon has to be analyzed using data from multiple slices of the electromagnetic spectrum to even come close to making a solid determination as to just what it is. A tentative start in this direction can be achieved by combing radar reports with personal sightings. Air-traffic radars are all over the developed world, every major city has at least one but again these instruments have serious limitations; radar is easily fooled - ask the Air Force. Every radar operator knows, especially on older radars, that blips and spurious readings are a constant problem and always turn out to be caused by natural phenomenon when anyone takes the time to look, and they usually don't waste the effort. Technology attempts to compensate for things like flocks of birds, rain and dense clouds which can create mistaken identities, by limiting the radio frequency range or electronically filtering them out. Basically we have to understood that air-traffic control radars are carefully designed to detect large aluminum objects of a certain size and shape (commercial aircraft!) and anything that falls outside that narrow description is either not detected or comes up as a blip, an unknown error reading - in other words it tells the radar operator virtually nothing. In cases of serious danger to either air-traffic safety or national defense the obvious reaction is to scramble a fighter and find out what this error reading really is, if anything. But once again we are back to the above mentioned problem because the pilot in the jet sent to inspect only has his own two eyes and perhaps another radar in his planes nose cone.

The human eye is easily tricked into detecting movement where there really is none. If you look at this picture for a few moments you can start to see patterns, motions and a 'bubbling' effect.

People can tell you what they saw but that absolutely does not mean that's what was really there no matter what their social rank, personal credibility or how convinced they seem. Ideally any unusual event needs to be corroborated by multiple pieces of spectral evidence and not just visual wavelength light and a certain wavelength of microwaves from radar. Infrared, ultraviolet, all are helpful in figuring out what 'it' is and the more data the better determination one can make. Secondly any unusual event has to be repeated otherwise it is just a fluke, a meaningless aberration. Trying to identify a singular extraordinary event is like trying to draw a chart with only one data point - it can't be done. We have to have at least two, and preferably more, similar occurrences in order to make any kind of accurate determination in the case of these fleeting, momentary encounters.

Unknown Events

When encountering and trying to understand the unknown always apply Occam's Razor. There a are a lot of unknown things still out there, especially in environments that are remote or poorly studied but none of them have ever proven to be supernatural or beyond the bounds of physical description. High atmospheric altitudes are a prime example of unexplored regions full of the unknown. Weird flashing lights in the high-sky? Just very recently over the ocean in East Asia a totally new form of lightning was discovered which traveled upwards from high cloud levels. No matter how incredible some events may seem at first sight they always turn out to follow the same laws of physics as everything else upon closer inspection. Anyone betting on the mystical answer or the wildly unlikely in life is making an embarrassing losing wager. Anyone who looks at a strange light in the sky and tries to convince others it's an alien spaceship instead of something reasonably possible like a military aircraft or a meteor is making that foolish wager.

Spiritual aspects of the UFO

A few people have even taken their unwavering faith in intelligent extraterrestrials and turned it into a full blown cult - and remember, a religion is just a cult that survives cultural evolution long enough to become socially acceptable and traditional. But the belief in alien life visiting Earth in the form of space ships as a UFO is a myth, it's a fantasy, especially that alien beings would remotely care about our own welfare or indeed anything at all about us. The technological levels required to even attempt interstellar space travel are so immense that if such alien beings did arrive they would view humans as we view a busy colony of ants. This myth is a testament to the enormously inflated human ego and sense of elevated place in the universe for such visiting aliens wouldn't even bother to stomp on our anthill because it wouldn't be worth the effort to get their feet dirty! Nonetheless this myth of alien visitors is an especially informative one concerning human nature and spiritual needs. There is a common human need for a savior in life, someone or something to come down and deliver us from doom, protect us from our dangerous folly and generally make all problems go away and leave us feeling warm and fuzzy without struggle or criticism.

But some people have this need more than others do; they often feel like they have little power or control over their lives and feel buffeted by uncontrollable outside events. They believe that only an external person or group can ever help them. This erroneous attitude is especially attractive because acceptance of the alternative, personal empowerment, necessitates responsibility for personal actions and outcome.

But others who think and feel able to take control of their lives, manage events, and plan ahead to minimize externally oriented problems, they respond positively to a realization of personal 'salvation'. 

Regardless of the individuals perspective the belief in visitations from alien beings of other planets is a direct reflection of this human need, a need for external salvation which is a dangerous diversion away from the true state of events. The only savior possible (if any) has to come from inside, ultimately everyone is their own savior because only you can ever save you. The more someone refuses to accept personal responsibility in outcome the more powerless they become and the more desperate is the need for external rescue. 22.07.03

Pop quiz hot-shots, who wrote this:

"Any and all social reforms superimposed upon our sick civilization can be no more effective than a bandage on a gaping and putrefying wound. Only the complete and total demolition of the social body will cure the fatal sickness. " ¹ [Scroll to the bottom of this page to see the last sentence and the author.]

Change

Change is a reaction to discomfort and the discomfort of new ideas and challenges to pre-existing notions in mind or environment. Social-scale change is the art of finding ways to make as many people uncomfortable as possible, it's turning it all upside-down from the inside-out. Yet to generate discomfort is classified by the dictatorship of public opinion as evil, therefore change is "evil". A very "black art" indeed. So fear the "evil" and be afraid, be very afraid, after all it might even help you.

1. "Only the overthrow of the three--thousand--year--old beast of masculist materialism will save the race" Elizabeth Gould Davis radical feminist (!), from The First Sex
2. One detail in the Enron documentary that needs to be explained: Jeffrey Skilling is reputed to have used Richard Dawkin’s book The Selfish Gene as the visionary motivation for his Enron machinations, in other words as a mistaken justification for financially raping the country like the class act businessman he is. The title of Dawkin’s book actually refers to the nature of the genes being selfish in their singular desire to reproduce, not genes that makes selfish people more successful! This is obvious to anyone who has read the book and not just the cover like the dipshit scumbag Jeffrey Skilling but nonetheless it needs to be clarified lest the misunderstanding perpetuate.