Nihilism.

You and I will die. We will be mourned but sill gradually become a smaller and smaller part of everyone's lives. Those who knew us will eventually pass and be forgotten. The human race will wither and the sun will dim. Nothing we do will leave an indelible mark on the universe and it would be virtually no consolation even if it did. Alan Watts once compared this line of thought to judging the value of a symphony to its last note, or a dance to its last step. The implication being that one is selectively ignoring all of the other fantastic and beautiful mysteries of life along the journey. This would be a valid rebuttal if life itself were not, on the whole, an exercise in futile torment. There is only enough good in the world to keep us prolonging our sentences. That life is meaningless is not, by itself, a great issue. That suffering is meaningless, however, cries out for a solution. Perhaps a savior will never come.

His words are not without any sort of wisdom, albeit. Our actions affect our lives and the lives of others and in the microcosm of human experience, we are all carried by these small ripples. What we long for is something greater than ourselves and whether you look at it subjectively or objectively, this is possible to an extent. True, it is not permitted that we will ever achieve even an echo in outter space, we nonetheless find meaning in art, sports, community, scientific curious, charity, etc… Although these lists generally leave out those who find meaning in cruelty, I acknowledge that this is possible to. I don't think it's necessary to say that such expressions of human transcendence are deplorable, I merely wanted to point out the possibility.

Nihilism is said to be a philosophy, but the truth is it's only an idea. The difference being that a philosophy is a system of ideas.The concept is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche. N basically admitted all of Schopenhauer's premises and rejected his conclusion. There is no God, no freewill, no soul, just meaningless suffering and brief but rare moments of joy for a race of ignorant monkeys on an insignificant ball of clay. His big contribution to this is that if we just embrace cruelty then all of sudden life is beautiful, since there's so much of it. Cruelty (aka the will to power) is the root of morality and art. Christianity/ nihilism (he uses the latter word in multiple ways) is cruelty turned in on itself and is thus a disease. For some of us, compassion and weakness is who we are and that's OK because we basically exist to serve the powerful elite, who are unencumbered by such Victorian notions. Lions require gazelles.

A lot of people don't like what he has to say because they assume he lumps himself in with the powerful; but all over his writings he uses health and vitality as metaphors for the power he is so obsessed with and he says at one point (I think in The Antichrist) that even the sons of preachers have blood on their hands. N had notoriously bad health and was the son of a preacher. Also, he was known to be a very compassionate person. He claimed that living a solitary and scholarly life shouldn't be considered a virtue, per se. He himself fit that bill but that was who he was authentically. Compassion and scholarship isn't to be required of those who aren't truly scholarly and compassionate. None of this necessarily has to do with his philosophy, but I feel it is an extremely underappreciated fact about a writer whom is spoken of much more often than he is read.

The biggest insight he had was that we can question the value of truth just as we can questionall values. Life is cruel and meaningless, but so what? Truth has as little value as everything else and we don't have to value it over our own happiness. In fact, we are free to create our own values. We shouldn't let dogma tell us we have to care about truth in of itself (especially if the truth is depressing) and we don't have to be so compassionate that we sacrifice our own happiness, although we're free to do so. Personally, I do value truth and compassion, but this all brings us back to Schopenhauer's pessimism, which Nietzsche may have railed against more so than Christianity and puts his thoughts into perspective. I think S is basically correct in his assessment of life. His metaphysics are interesting but outdated. Nietzsche refutes Schopenhauer with the claim that we cannot assess the value of life from inside of life but there's no reasoning to back up his atheist theodicy. It sounds good but it is a claim that can be dismissed with as little reason as there is supporting it. Question everything, right?

Nietzsche criticizes secular compassion as an unjustified bias inherited from Christianity but fails to show that Christianity is the origin of these sentiments. Surely, if there never was a God to command our love to begin with, then divine beneficence came from the realm of human experience and imagination. Besides that, cooperation is a well documented and widely selected for survival strategy among many species. Domestic dogs far out number wolves, so maybe strength and aggression aren't de facto the way to go. Nietzsche is an amazing writer and a deep thinker. I would consider him more of a kind of psychologist than a philosopher. What's best in him are his deeply personal insights, although he's certainly not a scientific thinker. I think it's pretty understandable that he would be misinterpreted as a nihilist, since for most people he is the one to fully introduce them to the concept of nihilism. His philosophy does succeed in going "through" nihilism in that he ultimately embraces subjectivity and he defeats pessimism at the cost of compassion (or at the cost of truth, perhap both) but most people who encounter him are either going to completely reject the reality of nihilism or else succumb to it.

Nietzsche's most famous words are "God is dead." which is a phrase so often misunderstood that it deserves to be put into context:

"Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."

Even those who despise everything N said cannot help but admire the way he said it.  The death of God means the death of meaning and in a lot of ways, it is what this text is about. This is a good way to see the distinction between moral nihilism and futility. Secular morality is indeed possible and it isn't certain that Nietzsche argued against this possibility, at least not always (scholars are quick to point out his many inconsistencies, despite his unique value as a questioner.) Rather, without God what is the point? Good may go unrewarded and evil unpunished. There is no guarantee or even much reason to engage in morality, beyond convention and fear of prosecution. The death of God doesn't represent moral nihilism, it represents futility. Many philosophers since N's time have developed complex, persuasive, and consistent moral frameworks. The problem is that with all the earthly uncertainty, the knowledge that we are plunging continually, why should anyone care? Any good you do will likely amount to no more than angrily shaking a stick at the sky and anything you accomplish will quickly be undone. Activist types and philosophers may shame you, but they're just people with opinions. Consuming media and information about political issues and extreme suffering may rile one's sympathies but the feeling, for most, quickly fades and we tend to go back to our daily lives, usually not noticing that we are not nearly as good as the people we think we are.

Nihilism can also be understood in another way. Nolen Gertz, in his book "Nihilism" covers the history of nihilism across literature, philosophy, politics and culture. He ultimately finds it as the convenient idea increasingly promoted by TV shows that we are ultimately ineffectual. Many TV shows have a format that require the characters to end up in basically the same situation they began in, since the show needs to go on while the characters remain mostly unchanged. From a creative point of view then, the status quo must be reinforced. It also serves power when shows promote any sort of moral that reinforces the status quo, either with some sort of optimistic platitude or else by promoting futility.

We see time and time again in superhero movies where the villain has some remotely progressive idea, or monologues about legitimate problems in society only to invariably go about solving these issue in a way that is heinous and irredeemable. Thus the heros come in a reinforce the status quo, possibly even sympathizing with the villain but ultimately doing nothing else. We see countless office sitcoms where characters are faced with absurdly kafkaesque obstacles and they are impotent to do anything about it. These stories are invariably produced by people and institutions that have material interests in maintaining the current order and by giving audiences a relatable distraction, are able to provide a bit of escapist opium to the masses. Mark Fischer has a similar idea throughout "Capitalist Realism", even outright stating that our economic system can absorb and thrive on anti-capitalist propaganda. Marx's books sell just as well as dystopia movies depicting a post apocalyptic society brought about by corporate greed. "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism."

All of this demotivation leads to something that can be called nihilism which is truly pandemic, to the extent Nietzsche feared and lost his sanity trying to cure. Most people, when asked, claim to believe in purpose, right and wrong, freedom, they want to make the world a better place. Despite this, despite nearly everyone wanting to live in a protopian world, most of us realize this world far more closely resembles the opposite.  If nihilism means believing in nothing and if action proves conviction, it's safe to say that nearly all of us are nihilists. To an extent, this may simply be human nature. We conform with popular opinions, we don't want to think about great evils beyond our control and we don't care as much about things that we don't perceive as affecting us. All the same, we live in a society that reinforces those aspects of our disposition and that is not an immutable, natural law.

Nietzsche was infamously associated with the nazi movement after his death, although this has largely been discredited as he outright denounces nationalism and anti semitism. He is also credited with predicting the coming tragedy of World Wars 1 and 2, in some vague way. He predicted that the next century would be a time of global war,

"The time for petty politics is over: the next century will bring the struggle for the domination of the earth – the compulsion to great politics."

N was keen to observe that the soon to be prevailing nihilism would leave people as empty vessels waiting to be filled with whatever meanings were laying around. Carl Schmitt (an actual nazi philosopher) made a remarkably similar observation in his critique of liberalism. He felt that liberalism, in it's pursuit of tolerance, nullified vital aspects of human identity such as religion, race, gender, and basically every means by which individuals might find a sense of higher meaning. Liberalism thereby sacrificed any sort of meaning that might generate animosity between different demographics at the alter of economic prosperity. The massive black hole that was once occupied by God left mankind ripe for fascism.

Fascism can be hard to define. The problem is especially pointed as Fascism seems to have responded to its widespread negative perception and, through something like memetic natural selection has evolved a chameleon like defense mechanism in order to persist. It's official definition is some list of attributes along the lines (1) Centered around a charismatic strong-man (2) Strong belief in tradition and systems of hierarchy/ inequality (3) Racial and/ or National purity and (4) Toleration and even approval of violence against nonconformists. There are other characteristics and not all of them are required, in fact fascism rarely, if ever arrives fully formed. Fascism tends to co opt ideals, slogans and symbols from other successful movements and ideologies in order to capitalize on the vacuum of meaning. Much of fascism revolves around the idea of decadence and rebirth brought about by a return to the traditional values that once defined the nation. It is an attempt to go backward in time to before the death of meaning.

In the later 1910s, Hitler was working as the PR and recruiter for the German Worker Party. He gradually took on more public roles and spoke passionately at rallies. He believed the best way to sway people to his cause was to focus on slogans and symbols, rather than logical arguments. Hitler also believed that the Allies had won the war because of propaganda. It was not uncommon for German philosophers to believe in the metaphysical concept of "Will" as the essence of all life, and Hitler thought that emotional appeals and propaganda had the power to excite and direct the collective will of a nation. In these early modern times, politicians weren't well known but Hitler presented himself as a proto-celebrity. In 1923 he led a coup d'etat, styled after Mussolini's March on Rome, that came to be known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler capitalized on anti-government resentment, as many Germans felt betrayed by the government for economic hardship brought on by the treaty of Versailles. For this, he was arrested for treason and sentenced to prison, where he began work on Mein Kampf.

While anti semitism was already common in Germany, after his release from prison Hitler intensified this rhetoric. Common posters could be seen of a Jew (with a stereotypical big nose) stabbing Germans in the back, or whispering into the ears of socialists. The more insidious the jews were seen to be, the more virtuous the "real" Germans were by contrast. The Nazi party would flood public discourse with soundbites and images as part of Hitler's theory of repetition. Despite being vocal, the party remained fringe until the late 20s when Nazis made an accord with American Economist Owen Young, who provided the party with corporate funding in exchange for a guarantee that the Nazis would not pursue any sort of Bolshevik style take over of the means of production.

Crowds loved Hitler because he spoke passionately and in plain, common language. He was seen as a man of the people, rather than an elitist politician talking down to the crowd. He wasn't afraid to say things that police society couldn't admit to. While critical of liberalism in general and the French revolution in particular, both Hitler and Mussolini recognize the mobilizing power of liberal and leftist rhetoric, again coopting whatever values were laying around. Hitler wanted to use red on the nazi flag specifically to attract workers who may have been won over by socialist ideas. The Nazis in particular held a belief in what is known as the "Great Replacement Theory" which, as the name implies, was a widespread fear among "true" Germans that they were being replaced by inferior races by being outbred or by invasive foreigners. This went hand in hand with theories of eugenics, an idea first born in it's modern form in America. Evolution and social darwinism led to theories of biological decadence, the idea that the modern man had become lazy and sluggish due to his mastery over nature. Men were no longer men and women were longer women, the party took advantage of widespread anxiety concerning gender norms and identity. 

Then Wall St crashed and the great depression hit. France and Britain had to call in German debts. Business contracted and unemployment, as well as inflation skyrocketed. People began questioning liberal doctrines of free market and separation of powers. They had sacrificed everything that made them unique in order to become consumers and now even that was failing. The culprit, according to the Nazis, was the Jews. Hitler seized upon the chaos and was elected in 1933. Per the treaty of Versailles, the countries that made up the former German Empire were guaranteed a right to self determination, the intention being that these countries should remain independent. Hitler argued that Germany had as much a right to self determination as any other country and for this reason his army would occupy the Rhineland and German-Austria. At the time, leftist ideas were heavily censored and there were not many people who could publicly speak out against German occupation. With only right wing voices, these occupations seemed somewhat welcome. Hitler convinced Britain and France that he was merely reconstructing the true Germany. 

Feeling the rush of success and riding a wave of overwhelming public support, Hitler invaded Austria. This is the point the war began. For most Germans, the Nazi party was a source of stability. Through state intervention they had defeated the great depression as well as managed to provide many social services, -from welfare and child care to vacation and entertainment services- to the "true" German people. With over 300 concentration camps, no German was fully unaware of the mass extermination that was taking place, few bothered to know and fewer still bothered to resist. They were being provided for and that was all that mattered, perhaps they reasoned that the jews really did deserve it after all, or that it wasn't so horrible. They saw Hitler's success in expanding the nation and overcoming economic disaster. The Nazi army had quick success fighting off and then occupying France. While they did not overwhelm Britain with the same force, they were winning. It wasn't until Hitler turned to invade the soviets that the tide turned against Germany. Despite what is claimed in America history classes, it is the Soviets who are largely responsible for defeating the Germans.

Much of fascism and it's ideals can be traced all the way back to Plato. Plato admired the Spartans for their military discipline and social harmony, much like later fascists would (and still do.) His ideal society, described in the Republic, was led by an all powerful philosopher-king and ran by a warrior class of guardians. Plato recommended rewriting and censoring Greek myths in order to cultivate nationalistic norms and proper behavior, an early form of propaganda. He had his own theories of eugenics and also wanted to demolish romantic and familial ties because he didn't want his ideal citizens to have any interests that might conflict with national interests. His theory of justice was that members of a society each had a particular function and when everyone was cooperating like a well ordered machine, under the benevolent hand of a righteous ruler, society had achieved a natural state of justice. Possibly the only missing element from this proto-fascist formula was a foreign policy of aggressive expansionism, which Plato was against. This foundation would later be elaborated upon by thinkers like Machiavelli ("The Prince") and Thomas Hobbes ("Leviathan") and it's worth noting that all of these philosophers lived in times of general chaos and saw the need from a strong, centralized authority to tame man's violent tendencies. 

Returning to Carl Schmitt, he defined politics by its foundational duality. Where ethics was concerned with good and evil, aesthetics with beauty and ugliness, politics was defined by the friend vs enemy distinction. While Nietzsche would have denounced the Nazis if he were still alive, it's clear how his concept of will-to-power is reminisced in the friend- enemy distinction. God may be dead but valor and violence wasn't and hatred of a common enemy is much more unifying than love. Schmitt claimed that it was pointless to try to suppress violent tendencies in human nature and recommended instead directing it, hence the fascist need for some political scapegoat. It's usually an easily recognizable minority group, be it Jews, blacks, the LGBT, or foreigners. People were most effectively unified when there was a common, existential threat. He felt that liberalism was naive and deluded in characterizing man as a rational being and emphasizing racial equality. He felt that liberalism reduced mankind to consumers and entrepreneurs, living in the free market and forever pursuing greater profit margin, hence when promises of prosperity seemed to break, individuals under capitalism would return to nihilistic infighting. Schmitt noted that despite all the talk of limited government and checks and balances, liberal republics tended to exercise state authority in times of emergency, such as war or natural disasters. In other words, for all its virtue signaling, liberals weren't much different from fascists when rational debate wasn't enough and economic interests were at risk.

The historian Umberto Eco, who lived through fascist Italy, defined fascism as "A fuzzy totalitarianism." Theodore Adorno, in The Authoritarian Personality, tried to define what exactly led to the rise to power of fascists. Adorno et al conducted studies on participants to find a correlation between anti semitism and ethnocentrism. They found that these people held rigid, categorical ways of thinking about people and the world. Not surprisingly, participants who scored high in left wing values had a negative correlation to ethnocentrism. The important findings, however, is that conservative participants did not necessarily correlate to highly ethnocentric thinking. Adorno suspected the difference came to be why participants held conservative views. There was a similar pattern in religiosity, among those who scored high religiosity, those who had simply inherited the beliefs in their parents also scored high in ethnocentrism while those who came to their own religious understanding did not.

From these findings, Adorno proposed his sketch of the authoritarian personality. While in later decades, the details from his conclusions have been brought into question (much of his reasoning was based on psychoanalysis rather than empirical science) Bob Altemeyer suspected the basic idea was correct. Altemeyer defined the authoritarian-follower (we can expect these attributes do not apply to fascist leaders) by their (1) High degree of submission to "legitimate" authorities (2) Notable aggression towards nonconformists and anyone considered degenerate by those authorities and (3) General conventionalism, as in adherence to long standing social mores. It should be easy to see how nihilism can evolve into this sort of thinking, worshiping a new messiah and willing to fight for whatever higher purpose is on offer. In his original work, Adorno pointed out that since the authoritarian personality is driven by a certain way of thinking about the world, an emotional intuition, refuting their specific prejudice with facts is often ineffective. Individuals with fascist tendencies often hold many contradictory beliefs and dissolve cognitive dissonance by projecting onto targeted groups. The Nazis believed the Jews were a violent cabal intent on destroying Germany, while they themselves perpetuated most of the violence and nearly destroyed Germany after Hitler ordered crucial infrastructure to be destroyed rather than occupied by Allied forces. For these reasons, even if one could successfully refute one sort of prejudice, the authoritarian personality would likely redirect their aggression towards some other vulnerable minority group. And while current studies show that this personality is generally low (it has its highest incidence in America, nearly a quarter of the population) if the rest of the population, as is usually the case in liberal democracies, is generally apathetic and disengaged from politics, the mind virus will spread.

When the Allied forces had finally liberated those help in concentration camps, Germans were invited to see for themselves what was inside. What they saw was skeletal bodies walking among piles of skeletal corpses, not looking much less alive than those walking. They and the guards stood and walked around, well fed. The onlookers, unlike the guards, were not desentized to the horror before them. The inmates had largely grown acclimated to their environment and seemed to have little to no reaction anymore. Starved corpses were dragged into pits and thrown into tractor buckets. When the Allied troops had restored water to the camp, prisoners were initially afraid to shower, expecting to be beaten. Many could not eat without assistance. Even after liberation, scores of prisoners died daily. Survivors had to remain quarantined in their camps until they could be disinfected and deloused as typhus was rampant among them.

In the Belson camp there were found 200 children, some of whom were born behind bars. It is the image of a fragile newborn, completely innocent and ignorant of the world, born against the backdrop of these perturbing scenes that I find most striking. In the first days of liberation, 1000s of bare corpses were hauled and dumped into mass graves. Each was once a human being who died anonymously, having known the most extreme conditions of terror and agony and never living to see salvation. While in operation, inmates were led en masse to chambers. Once completely full of bodies, poison gas was released and they died, screaming and suffocating. Officers were given death-quotas, hundreds every single day. Among common items found in liberated camps, there were tattoos which had been skinned off of inmates and turned into lampshades. In Leipzig, 300 inmates were burned alive so as to prevent them from being freed by advancing Allied forces. Those who managed to escape the barn were met with machine gun bullets, flamethrowers and an electrified fence.

It is my intention that in this text I can somehow answer the question posed earlier; Why should we care in a world where there are no guarantees and little to no reason for hope? How should we respond to futility and suffering? When I think about the complicity of the German citizens I cannot help but feel immense guilt for the actions of their leaders. The fact that you or I didn't actively perpetrate these heinous crimes is merely a historical accident. Had we been alive at that time and that place, there is scarcely any reason to expect that we would have done anything different. The heroism of the Allied troops is counterbalanced by the vicious devastation of the Nazis and between the 2 extremes there is the banal nihilism of ordinary denizens like you and I. There was nothing special or unique about German citizens except that by some nefarious serendipity, they were there. For all intents and purposes, we were there too.

The images above were captured by cameramen in 1945 in a documentary entitled "Memory of the Camps" and is available on YouTube for free. There is no accompanying music and the narration is unemotional with long pauses between descriptions of the footage being shown. The footage itself is practically 45 minutes of troops hauling boney corpses to be dumped and buried in large pits, this repetitive image is only briefly interrupted with images of corpses which had been burned and left to rot. If words have not yet conveyed the horror of the suffering I have thus far described, you are invited to watch the film.