I love reading embedded critiques of “hipsters” and this so-called movement you can’t avoid if you’re 20-something and in a major North American city. (For the record, I’m not discrediting the rest of the world, I’m just admitting solidarity with Portland, OR.) Hipsters have been called nihilists, shamelessly turning inward and backward and not creating anything new. I would like to argue with and support this at the same time by pointing out that the music hipsters love, Independant Rock, is doing something magnificently new! They’re writing love song after love song set during or after the apocalypse!

That’s kind of twisted, isn’t it? It seems like I might be exaggerating a little, doesn’t it? Well, I’m hardly an expert, but here are a few for the record. (Please feel free to link me to more examples or arguments in the comments, I do believe that’s what they’re for.)

I had to include the Postal Service to prove to you that it’s not just the Canadians falling in love with the apocalypse like this.

So what do we call this syndrome? Apocophilia? Erotipocalypse? Armageddiniton?

..I’m sorry for that last one, I had to. Any other suggestions?

Nihilistic Poetry

Via Aqurette hittar jag hemsidan till det danska partiet Nihilistisk Folkeparti. Jag fann direkt dess anslag sympatiskt. Jag gillade också detta politiska krav:

STOP KIRKEKLOKKER SØNDAG MORGEN!
Gud er død. Når NFP bliver repræsenteret i borger repræsentationen, vil vi tage konsek­vensen og arbejde for, at landets borgere aldrig igen skal være ofre for en lille, forskruet minoritets religiøse chikane.

När kommer ett systerparti till Sverige?

Se det tidigare inlägget “Glassbilen och kyrkklockor”.

Irrealism. Modernity can be seen as a kind of victory for realism, but this victory was always already betrayed by capitalism, disseminated to death. Despite all appearances, the masks and pseudonymity of the postmodern era indicate not an abandonment of the war against cynicism and superstition, but rather a renewed undertaking of this same battle with a greater degree of caution, pragmatism and assiduity than the modern age could have imagined necessary.

Will to think. Philosophy at its very best is saddening, a cautious disenchantment: a deciphering of the hidden resentment with which we have crafted our values, the nihilism behind the idealities humanity has raised above itself. Yet how could philosophy ever have taken hold and prospered without a certain artistry in masking its true purpose from us; how could it not begin by seducing us to another reality — seducing us to reject this life and this reality? Consider that the will to think must partially close the “field” of thought, in this way allowing it to acquire definite shape and form: the force of thought severs thought from becoming, reducing the chaos of becoming into an organized noise. In this sense, the force of thought disjoins not only a given thought from what it can do but transforms the very categories of thought in order to render existence inert, harmless and ready for transmission. The innate becoming reactive of thinking is what philosophy opposes in all ages and throughout all its disguises.

Psyche. We are always furthest away from ourselves: there is a “necessary unconsciousness” of the underlying machinery of thought; it cannot be integrated into consciousness without violence and tragedy. The healthy constitution of the workshop of the unconscious is the entire problem of psychoanalysis; yet is not psychoanalysis then, at least insofar as it depends on extruding a repressed trauma to work its cure, founded upon the paradox (or illusion) of knowing what we cannot know — the unconscious meaning of the symptom — in short, knowing what we should not be able to know? It is indeed this strange ethical status of psychoanalysts which makes their “cure” possible — i.e., by pretending to an esoteric insight, a “necessarily unattainable” knowledge of the nature of the soul, the pathway to a cure for certain neurotics is possible. For everyone else, psychoanalysis as constituted cannot help but botch the cure at the start, driving it to return again and again to an overpowering and miraculous violence by which the unconscious may be interpreted, and so already transformed, “healed.” Our certain ignorance is ignored for the sake of the cure, since at any rate therapy will provide the hooks one requires to enact the transformation; in this way one ultimately abandons the truth of the symptom. Without shame one may now impose an identical interpretation upon every case, since we should not know the truth.

Torn. There is a tragic flaw in every first principle; behind each first principle there is a force which may be interpreted. Thinking is not mediation (or axiomatization for that matter) but always a becoming, and a becoming “active” only insofar as it is taken to its limit. Thinking is itself rendered legible in turn only by uncovering the force of thought, which is not the driving force within the thought; rather almost the opposite: the force of thinking is that which subjugates thought, that force which extracts thinking as though from the raw “material” of subjectivity.

That’s what I’ve noticed. In the academy, no; but in real life, yes.

Anyway, until today I’d believed without examination that most opposition to game comes from women, but really it is only a minority of women; those who are loud and institutionalised. (Ha-ha.) The rest are quite accepting of their tragic nature. More accepting, it seems, than the sycophantic swarms of beta males.

Say, have you people ever heard of that awesome television series: Firefly? You have? Good for you. Did you hear about the truly revolutionary Film based on the TV Series called “Serenity”? You have? Well Okay then. Finally, do you people think Firefly-Serenity was promoted enough? As if, in this point in time, F-S was so underpromoted that the whole franchise really didn’t get the chance it deserved?

If you believe in that crap, then you’re reading the wrong blog post.

The whole F-S cycle is the most overrated excuse for a franchise that has ever been concieved. I avoided the whole thing just based on the hype alone. Then, when I got a chance to watch the whole Firefly series on Hulu, I found out the hard way what a big pile of excrement this thing really was.

My points of contention with the franchise:

1. The Never-ending puke river of Nihilism that permeates the series
2. The Vacuous Backstory
3. The Fake “Realism”
   

First off, the Nihilism. Really? Nihilism? Did I just say that this franchise was nihilistic? You better believe that this franchise is nihilistic. The people behind F-S really go that extra mile to deliver that cheap shot to the cojones type of nihilism I’ve come to despise in things outside of F-S. F-S wears it’s nihilism on it’s sleeve, tattoos it’s chest with it, and drops it’s pants and moons you with it every step of the way.

That nihilism extends to the characters of the franchise also. I’m talking about The Protagonists here. These people are impossible to root for even as Anti-Heroes. Oh Sure, these people engage in light-hearted banter that makes them tolerable for awhile. But on the things that count, these guys are detestable vermin no sane person would want at their side.

As for the Alliance, they really never get enough screen time to evoke any impressions beyond superficial ones, which leads us to the next issue….

F-S has no real backstory! There, I’ve said it. I feel that a great weight has been lifted off of me now that I’ve come to terms with the fact that no back story actually exists for F-S. It would actually violate the creators’ hard-line stance on nihilism to have a backstory of any substance. Oh yeah, there’s the whole “Alliance vs Independents” thing. But that’s only a pretext for this series, NOT A REAL STORY.

The Alliance doesn’t work as a fictional entity because they are depicted in two contradictory ways:

1. As a monolithic “Evil Empire”
2. As a bunch of hapless dipsticks that are convenient victims for Reavers and more mundane forms of piracy.
   

The mention of Alliance personnel as “Hapless dipsticks that are convenient victims for Reavers” sets up my final point: The Fake “Realism”

Ah Yes, if there’s anything that can raise my hackles beyond the Nihilism and Zero-Story content of Firefly-Serenity, it’s the whole attitude towards “telling it like it is”-style arrogance of the show’s creators and it’s fans.

Ok, I’m up for another round of that neverending, stupid debate on “Realism in Science Fiction”. Actually, I’m not. Not because I’m against realism per se, but because I’ll get bogged down in the stupid postmoderism of the show’s creators and fans.

What I’m going to to is to cite 2 examples of the stupidity of this series where it utterly fails by any standard of realism

First example, In the Jaynestown episode, We have a character that is introduced as an archenemy of Jayne Cobb, Stitch Hessian. We first see this character when he is released from a POW-style sweatbox AFTER FOUR YEARS.

He is healthy, whole, and ready to kick ass right out of the box without any kind of REHABILITATION OR MEDICAL CARE WHATSOEVER.

Even by sci-fi standards, this is unforgivably stupid. Boxes like the one Stitch was in are DESIGNED TO BREAK PEOPLE. But by some miracle, the detestable planetary overlord managed to care for a man(who tried to rob him!) in less than ideal conditions. There’s not even any cheap MacGuffin-Medicine included in the plotline to deal with all of this. This story was written by morons, for morons.

Even by postmodern standards, a hellhole POW-style sweatbox does not work wonders for ones’ health. The Firefly series is full of stupid stuff like this.

Now that I’ve handled the physical reality that F-S operates under, it’s time to confront the bogus behavior and fake backstory of Firefly.

Bushwacked is an episode that features two very different antagonists to the Serenity crew. The Reavers and the Alliance. There is only one actual Reaver depicted in the episode. How a person becomes a Reaver is subject to debate(at least, until they introduced that stupid retcon in the Serenity movie which I have not seen, but read about).

Retcons aside, The role the alliance plays here is that of “bunch of victims for the newly minted Reaver”. The F-S franchise has trouble deciding if the alliance constitutes “an Evil Empire” or “a bunch a victims” because of the grossly nihilistic attitudes of the F-S productions.

Yes, here we go with the nihilism again. But in this circumstance, it backfires. There is less exposition given to the creation of the Reavers than there is to the creatures in a third-rate zombie movie. The Firefly-Serenity series is so nihilistic that the very idea of storytelling is an exercise in pointless stupidity.

All that’s left here, when you look carefully at it, is a stupid “Vietnam Trip-wire Veteran” story combined with the imagery of the Hellraiser movies.

It fails to entertain, or enlighten, or anything else positive. Nor was it ever intended to.

Ok, so you’re asking: “What was it intended for?” Here’s your answer: To intimidate, to humiliate, and to keep you off balance.

Apparently, you people in the audience out there are a bunch of grain-fed Sheeple who need to get kicked in the ass at every opportunity. Yes, the creators of the Firefly series and the Serenity movie have total contempt for their audience. In this episode, they throw around blood and guts in a vain effort to get people to take them and the show seriously.

Now that I’ve covered all of that unreality, it’s time to confront the heavy-handed moralizing that also constitutes the “realism” of the F-S franchise.

In the closing minutes of the “Jaynestown” episode, we’re treated to a conversation between Mal Reynolds and Jayne Cobb:

Jayne Cobb: Don’t make no sense… What, Why the hell that muther have to go and do that for Mal? jumping in front of that shotgun blast. Hell, there weren’t a one of them that understood what happened out there, that(sic) probably sticking that statue right back up.

Mal Reynolds: Most like(ly)

JC: I don’t know why it eats at me so

MR: It’s my estimation that every man who ever got a statue made of him was one kind sumbitch or another. It ain’t about you Jayne, it’s about what they need.

JC: Don’t make no sense.

This exchange is so out-of-character with the previous behavior of the characters that it sticks out like a sore thumb. They really don’t seem like the type of people who would be concerned about the fate of a bunch of strangers. In the final analysis, this scene was contrived to make a cheap, nihilistic point about how all people who get statues made in their likeness are total bastards. WHICH FLAT-OUT CONTRADICTS JAYNE COBB’S INTROSPECTION AT THE END OF THIS EPISODE.

How did a Nihilistic, Brain-dead, cheap-shot infested series like Firefly ever get a huge fanbase? I used to think that the “Fans” were mere astroturfers. However, the truth is more vile than even I could have imagined.

What I am about to suggest is so bizarre, that even I have trouble believing it. But it rings true

James Randi(AKA The Amazing Randi) wrote on page 99 of his 1989 book: The Faith Healers

(Joseph)Barnhart suggested a scenario that I have come to accept–though with some difficulty–because it satisfies all the evidence and it has been confirmed by my subsequent investigations.

He contends that the faith-healing service functions as a significant drama for those who attend. This explains their willingness to believe what others see as obvious delusions. He says we cannot divide the participants into “audience” and “Performers.” The entire auditoriium becomes a huge stage, with both the preachers and the believers taking part in the drama. A careful observer notices that almost everything in the drama leads up to the climax, the long-anticipated healing scene. It is a ritual of major magical importance to the participants.

Barnhart points out that the afflicted person wants to get close to this magic. By pretending–earnestly–and by refusing to entertain any doubt, on his or her part or on behalf of another, the subject maintains and reinforces the myth that all of the actors have agreed to believe in, for their own reasons. The faith-healing service is a sort of mutually accepted morality play that is participated in without doubt or hesitation, for fear of breaking the spell.

The above gimmick is used in other fields besides faith-healing. While the average Firefly-Serenity “fan” believes themselves superior to your average inbred faith-healer, they engage in exactly the same techniques and attitude depicted in the Randi book excerpt.

Stripped of all religious-healing influences, The Fake Audience Trick consists of:

• A general “reality is made by FAKING SHIT REALLY HARD” attitude.
• Shouting down any criticism.
• Presenting yourself as more: Serious, Hardcore, Spiritual, Moral , Ect. than anyone else.
• Presenting the subject matter as more :Serious, Hardcore, Spiritual, Moral, Ect. than anything else in the field.
• hanging on the the absurd belief that something positive can come from all of this stupidity.
  

This is the foundation of all religion, politics, publicly-traded companies, pyramid schemes, marketing, and Firefly-Serenity Fandom.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention an important part of the trick:

• Make up excuses (or scapegoats) to explain away your failures.(Which there will be a lot of)

Firefly Fans have as their scapegoat-excuse: “Firefly-Serenity wasn’t promoted enough”. This is inaccurate. Firefly(and Serenity) was promoted, stoked up, hyped, and finally shoved in the face of a public that didn’t want anything to do with it.

More than one person has commented on the messed-up, retarded, abrasive and painful nature of witnessing Firefly fandom. Outlaw Vern commented on Firefly fandom in his review of the Serenity movie:

I consider myself a brave man but more than once I found myself eyeing the fire exit. I was planning my escape and it wouldn’t have been a daring one like in the movie, it would’ve been more like when Old Dirty Bastard fled the hospital without checking out.

Inside the theater was worse. There was a singalong of a folk song about the characters. There was people trying to talk in space cowboy talk.

Ho boy, this isn’t like Trek or Wars fandom. This is entirely different. They seem to be trying too hard. Vern has encountered some weirdos in his time.(See his Chaos(2005) DVD review). But he seemed genuinely scared at the Serenity viewing.

This all seems like a Viral Marketing project that mutated into a cult.(Think “Xenu” but without the laughs)

How did all of this come about? I’ve got a pretty good idea, but you’ll have to take my notions about nihilism and the 1990s-2000s seriously to understand it.

To understand Firefly fandom you have to go back to the 1990s, The Nihilistic Nineties. Did I mention that I hated the 1990s?(and to a lesser extent, the 2000s). If I didn’t, let me state right here: I HATED THE 1990S. I hate the 90s so much, I won’t bother to explain why. Instead, I’ll let Greg Stacy, of the OC Weekly, articulate his attitude toward the 1990s, which happens to coincide with mine:

Besides, that’s a time most of us are happy to forget. Who the hell gets nostalgic for the LA riots, grunge or O.J. hysteria? It was one of the most volatile yet paradoxically least interesting times in our nation’s history. I remember long nights searching the radio for anything listenable; eventually I’d grow so bored with the rap and metal I’d end up stuck with Art Bell’s loony conspiracy theories. It’s an experience (GTA)San Andreas re-creates with depressing accuracy, right down to a so-so Art Bell parody.

–Pop! Culture
Getting lost on the streets of San Andreas, December 23, 2004

That rhetorical question about “Who the hell gets nostalgic for the LA riots, grunge or O.J. hysteria?” has to be answered here. Since this is a blog post about Firefly-Serenity and its fans, the answer should be obvious. F-S fans are vile, nihilistic types who think that the planet Earth reached cultural Satori in the period between The LA Riots and the publication of the novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk in 1996.

But the influence nowadays on F-S fandom isn’t so much “Tyler Durden” anymore but “The Joker from the movie The Dark Knight (2008)”. Just like The Joker only wanted to burn the world, so do the F-S fans want to burn the very idea of fandom. Having failed in their putrid efforts to astroturf the success of the whole Firefly-Serenity cycle, they are going to make lots of noise and burn the internet with their behavior.

Worse, these clowns manage to get the whole F-S franchise attention it doesn’t really deserve.

But let’s get back to the substance of the Firefly series and the Serenity movie. Oh that’s right, THERE IS NO SUBSTANCE IN THE F-S FRANCHISE.

Ironically, The Evil Megacorporation depicted in the Alien Movies has a sunnier take on humanity than the protagonists of Firefly. The white-hot nihilism of the 1990s has turned into the cold ashes of the 2Ks. With the approach of the new decade, I’m going to do everything I can to burn the nihilists. I’m going it alone, and no hypester is going to have any fun in the future. Most importantly, “Hardcore” is going to be the joke of the 2010s.

You know there are about a million positions between and outside capitalism and socialism, right? Like denying one does not automatically imply the other. You’re aware of this, yes? And that these two terms are very vague and come in many forms?

Yet another constant of human psychology which spells doom.

Here’s a great comment on contemporary culture, and what we should really be considering. Every now and again I dose my self with some anti-establishment literature to soothe my soul.

This is just kick-ass nihilism!

PhilosopherPoet

Poet: Andrew C.
Source: Myfacespacebook.com

Welcome to my-face-space-book, dot com

It’s a social network created by so-called experts

The finest in brainwash scientists teamed up

A collaboration in emancipating humanity from itself

Green bucks, vanity in a nutshell

Just to feel the built in wallets in their butt’s swell

Sometimes it makes my gut delve

But the thought stops it’s lingering

When I start fingering my keyboard

This is better than an MTV brand sea-shore

Full of three-hundred and thirty-three whores

times two

I can chat while getting my favorite corporation’s logo tattooed

on my-face-space

The book fell of the ledge in to the flaming pit

How does literature cooked taste?

How’s for a survey to find the answer?

Dan from Montana thinks it tastes like wal-mart cancer

Which, by the way, tastes delicious

Or so I’m told by Ex-Sex-Pistols bassist, Sid Vicious

But isn’t he dead?

Of course, but his name-sake was bought  by Macky-Fred 

Or was it Freddy-Mac, Goldman and Sachs? 

My-face feels like it just got taxed for it’s space

My face feels like it was attacked by a burning copy of The Grapes of Wrath

My, my… how it feels to be faceless

Lipless, tongue-less equals tasteless

Everything I held dear is make-shift

My-face-space-book, dot calm

Mind state;

raped and left for dead on the front lawn

Helgen var givande. Jag kan inte minnas när jag till samma grad släppte alla tankar om prestation. Utan någon egentlig ansträngning höll jag mig till principen om att inte blunda för idéer – jag öppnade upp för möjliga krav att stiga på, men det fanns inget utrymme, de stannade utanför och rökte.

Jag befinner mig till största delen fortfarande i det tillståndet. Min nihilism har, för tillfället, tagit över. Trist, kan tyckas, men jag har känslan av att han har sällskap, och att hon har långt mer att erbjuda.

Jag försöker att låta varje fas ta den plats den behöver, vilket innebär att släppa tankarna om vad som skulle vara bra att tänka och istället acceptera mani, stiltje och förakt som det kommer. Det är emellertid inte det lättaste att veta när tillåtande är en flexibel attityd, och när det är att mota bort tankar för att jag tror att de är mindre naturliga än de jag bereder väg för; för att jag moraliserar.

Check out this amazing UK Times article. (H/T ECM)

First, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold:

“Harris wore a ‘Natural Selection’ T-shirt on the day of the killings. They made remarks on video about helping out the process of natural selection by eliminating the weak. They also professed that they had evolved to a higher level than their classmates. I was amazed at the frequent references to evolution, and that the press completely ignored that aspect of the tapes.”

[...]As the attorney for the families of six of the students killed at Columbine, the Denver lawyer Barry Arrington has come across more in a similar vein. “I read through every single page of Eric Harris’s journals; I listened to all of the audio tapes and watched the videotapes? It became evident to me that Harris consciously saw his actions as logically arising from what he had learnt about evolution. Darwinism served as his personal intellectual rationale for what he did. There cannot be the slightest doubt that Harris was a worshipper of Darwin and saw himself as acting on Darwinian principles.”

And Pekka-Eric Auvinen:

Before he embarked on his shooting spree, Auvinen posted a lengthy apologia on the internet. Styling himself a “social Darwinist”, he said that natural selection appeared not to be working any more — had maybe even gone into reverse. He had noticed that “stupid, weak-minded people reproduce faster than intelligent, strong-minded ones”. The gene pool was sure to deteriorate if society continued to guarantee the survival of the second-rate. He had pondered what to do about this problem. He understood that life was just a meaningless coincidence, the outcome of a long series of random mutations, so there might not be much point in doing anything at all. But eventually he had decided he would do his bit by becoming a natural selector, aping the pitiless indifference of nature.

Auvinen left a special plea for his motivation to be taken seriously and for the world not merely to write him off as a psychopath, or to blame cult movies, computer games, television or heavy metal music, before concluding: “No mercy for the scum of the Earth! Humanity is overrated. It’s time to put natural selection and survival of the fittest back on track.”

The article continues:

One conclusion implicit in evolutionary theory is that human existence has no ultimate purpose or special significance. Any psychologically well-adjusted person would regard this as regrettable, if true. But some people get a thrill from peering into the void and acknowledging that life is utterly meaningless.

Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved — a set of sentiments or intuitions that developed from adaptive responses to environmental pressures tens of thousands of years ago. This does not merely explain the origin of morals, it totally explains them away. Whether an individual opts to obey a particular ethical precept, or to regard it as a redundant evolutionary carry-over, thus becomes a matter of personal choice. Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang “Randomness is good enough for me, If there’s no design it means I’m free” — lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel. Clearly they see evolution as something that emancipates them from the strict sexual morality insisted upon by their parents. But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.

Darwin himself thought that his theory warranted racism and genocide:

Darwin looked forward to a time when Europeans and Americans would exterminate those he termed “savages”. Many of the anthropomorphous apes would also be wiped out, he predicted, and the break between man and beast would then occur “between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon; instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla”. He took a sanguine view of genocide, believing it to be imminent and inevitable. “Looking to the world at no very distant date,” he wrote to a friend in 1881, “what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”

Convinced that the various races of mankind had travelled different distances down the evolutionary highway, and that two races could be fairly described as more or less evolved even when both had a track record of cultural achievement, Darwin insisted that natural selection explained why the Europeans had been able to see off serial invasions by the Ottoman Turks. Some of today’s Turks understandably resent being designated as genetically second-rate, which perhaps explains why the editor of Turkey’s most popular science magazine was instructed by his proprietor to cancel a special edition celebrating Darwin’s anniversary.

[...]Nowhere was the toxic doctrine of racial superiority more enthusiastically taken up than in the Third Reich. The Nazis believed that the Aryan race was already the most highly evolved, but could evolve further if defective genes could be eliminated. To purify the German gene pool, they decided to exterminate all the physically and mentally handicapped.

Darwin summed up his moral philosophy by saying that a man could “only follow those ideas and impulses that seem best to him”. Darwinian ideas, eugenics and its ugly sister, eugenic euthanasia, were accepted by the mainstream of the German scientific and medical professions. Indeed, so convinced were the staff of the clinic at Kaufbeuren-Irsee in Bavaria that they were acting rationally that, even after Germany’s surrender in 1945, they carried on killing handicapped people under the American occupation, until a US officer led a squad of GIs to the hospital and ordered them to desist.

The modern pro-abortion movement is rooted in the thought of Darwinian eugenicists like Margaret Sanger, who was quite explicit about weeding out the poor, the “unfit” and “inferior” races. Many people on the secular left believe that some people are not fit to live, and that these people should be weeded out by force. For example, Obama’s science czar advocates controlling the reproduction of undesirable people and that born babies are not human beings.

After you finish reading the UK Times article, check out this post over at Uncommon Descent. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

When we teach our children that their existence is an ultimately meaningless accident and that morals are arbitrary byproducts of random genetic fluctuations and mechanical necessity, should we be surprised that they place a lower value on human life than someone who is taught that all humans have inherent dignity and worth because they are made in the image of God?

[...]There are three and only three options.

1.  We can continue to fill our children’s heads with standard Darwinian theory (which Dennett rightly calls “universal acid”), understanding that at least some of them are going to put two and two together and realize that the acid has eaten through all ethical principles – and act accordingly.

2.  We can try to come up with a secular noble lie.  “OK kids.  You might have noticed that one of the implications of what I just taught you is that your lives are ultimately meaningless and all morals are arbitrary, but you must never act as if that is true because [fill in the noble lie of your choice, such as “morality is firmly grounded on societal norms or our ability to empathize with others”].

3.  We can teach our children the truth – that the universe reveals a wondrous ordered complexity that can only be accounted for by the existence of a super-intelligence acting purposefully.  And one of the implications of that conclusion is that God exists, and, reasoning further, He has established an objective system of morality that binds us all, and therefore the moral imperatives you feel so strongly are not just an epiphenomenon of the electro-chemical states of your brain.

This reminds me of the essay “Men Without Chests” in C.S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man”. Lewis writes that moral relativists undermine objective morality, which cannot be grounded rationally by atheism, and yet they are surprised when people actually act as though moral relativism is true.

The good news is that Darwinism is false. The bad news is taxpayer money from working parents is funneled into politicized government-run schools that teach children that Darwinism is true. High taxes ensure that parents are kept away from their children, since they must both work to pay for the government-run schools. The left’s opposition to stay-at-home mothers and fathers, (e.g., sex education, abortion, unilateral divorce, same-sex marriage, subsidies for single motherhood, etc.),  ensures that the government-run schools have more influence on children than the parents do.

Perhaps in reference to the void between atoms? Perhaps not…

Oh, there are plenty of people who never misbehave save when passion spurs them to ill; later, the fire gone out of them, their now calm spirit peacefully returns to the path of virtue and, thus passing their life going from strife to error and from error to remorse, they end their days in such a way there is no telling just what roles they have enacted on earth.  Such persons must surely be miserable: forever drifting, continually undecided, their entire life is spent detesting in the morning what they did the evening before.  Certain to repent of the pleasures they taste, they take their delight in quaking, in such sort they become at once virtuous in crime and criminal in virtue.  However, my more solid character is a stranger to these contradictions; I do my choosing without hesitation, and as I am always sure to find pleasure in the choice I make, never does regret arise to dull its charm.  Firm in my principles because those I formed are sound and were formed very early, I always act in accordance with them; they have made me understand the emptiness and nullity of virtue; I hate virtue, and never will I be seen resorting to it.  They have persuaded me that through vice alone is man capable of experiencing this moral and physical vibration which is the source of the most delicious voluptuousness; so I give myself over to vice.  I was still very young when I learned to hold religion’s fantasies in contempt, being perfectly convinced that the existence of a creator is a revolting absurdity in which not even children continue to believe.  I have no need to thwart my inclinations in order to flatter some god; these instincts were given me by Nature, and it would be to irritate her if I were to resist them; if she gave me bad ones, that is because they were necessary to her designs.  I am in her hands but a machine which she runs as she likes, and not one of my crimes does not serve her: the more she urges me to commit them, the more of them she needs; I should be a fool to disobey her.  Thus, nothing but the law stands in my way, but I defy the law; my gold and my prestige keep me well beyond the reach of those crude instruments of repression which should be employed only upon the common sort.

- Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom

A true nihilist would remain in silence, write not one verse or statement, would speak concisely the bare minimum needed for survival, short ambiguous phrases. Such a person would greet and live amongst people only in so far as he sees them as intimately unreal as his bubbling dream-thoughts, as his dream-desires, as his dreamed dreams. The true nihilist would be amazed by everything, from an ant that crawls over the index finger to the cold hairs of despair; every thing becomes an unknown appendix to a greater unfamiliar reality. He would have his coffee and smile because he is a passenger of time, or perhaps, he may consider being suddenly born into the suit of a wholly grown man that conducts his thinking through the agency of amputated words. The nihilist, if one ever existed, would come and go with the tides of the ordinary, would probably visit too landscapes in consciousness that a believer of truth could never reach (truth being an ten-ton burden); that nihilist, if so much can be said, would render all things possible and would make of contradictions and paradoxes household items with which he interacts daily.

The nihilist takes his coffee without sugar and life without objections.

Nihilistic Poetry

All’s well that ends well and Schaübhne Theatre Company’s revised and updated production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler ends very well.

The final moments of this production border on gloriousness. Unfortunately, the 130 minutes that proceed them are nowhere near as satisfying. Overall, this up-dated version of Ibsen comes across like a well-executed soap opera intermittently punctuated with rare moments of aesthetic brilliance.

Hedda Gabbler, our heroine, is bored and petulant from the very moment we meet her. We soon learn that she has married someone she doesn’t love because, of all her suitors, he is the only one willing to foot the bill for her pampered but boring lifestyle.

An old love re-enters her life, riding a wave of unexpected success. Hedda, fueled by a toxic mixture of bordeom and jealousy, decides to destroy his life and, effortlessly, she does. Her game, however, does not play out as she hopes and, because of her own criminal actions, she ends up at the mercy of someone who intends to take full sexual advantage of his power.

In one last desperate attempt to rail against the people and the world around her, Hedda kills herself. Unfortunately, for our heroine, her final act of defiance is ignored by the very people she intends to defy. Their indifference carries with it a hint of ridicule.

I suppose, in the late 19th century, Hedda’s situation might have engendered some sympathy because, at least in that context, it is more plausible to believe her existence is largely determined by her social circumstances. Even so, it is difficult to sympathize too much with Hedda because the aristocratic tragedy of her circumstances seems to be only that she is forced to marry beneath her station.

In the early 21st century, however, Hedda’s situation does not generate any sympathy. She is simply a spoiled brat who plays with pistols instead of surfing the net, who destroys the lives of old lovers because it is more vivid than HDTV, and who kills herself because she can’t be bothered finding a good lawyer.

On the one hand, it is plausible that the production intends to satirize the lifestyle of the German middle class, generally-speaking, and the 21st century Hedda, in particular, and the satire is lost on me because the play is performed in German, with French and English surtitles. Moreover, this more charitable reading helps justify performances, costume choices, and staging choices that are reminiscent of television soap opera.

For example, at one point, the German actor seems to use the word “kitsch”, the French translation uses “kitsch”, and the English translation uses the word “sentiment.” The expression “kitsch” brings with it a host of conations not at all captured by the word “sentiment.”  The result is the francophones in the audience have a big laugh that simply does not translate.

On the other hand, as far as I can gather from his interviews, director Thomas Ostermeier expects us to sympathize and identify with Hedda. From this I can only infer he also expects us to identify with her ennui, her disdain for the people around her, and her nihilism.

And with that discovery, we return to the final glorious scene.

Hedda lies dead, her suicide ignored. Suddenly, the conventions of realism are ruptured, as Hedda’s hopelessly naive husband discovers his home is revolving. He carries on as if nothing is really the matter. He ignores the absurdity of his metaphysical reality in the same way he ignores Hedda’s reaction to it.

I suspect Ostermeier’s intention is that we are meant to feel sympathy for Hedda whose last desperate effort at glory in an absurd world is ignored by a mediocre and naive middle class who likewise ignore the absurd foundations of their existence and carry on living as if nothing really is the matter.

On this reading, the final scene is a beautiful yet tragic homage to our nihilist heroine.

In contrast, in this final scene, I see a spoiled brat, whose last pathetic and self-indulgent tantrum is rightly ignored, along with the snobbery and metaphysical absurdity that motivates it. Her nihilist tragedy is, for me, a moment of delight. She is the fool, and the last laugh is on her.

The world’s middle classes are rightly criticized for many of their life choices, however, the decision to ignore the tantrums of a spoiled nihilist and to choose life in the face of its metaphysical absurdity is a choice that should always be celebrated — whoever makes it.

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Back to Nietzsche. More specifically, back to his stance on nihilism and his wish to hasten its coming only so that he could also hasten its ultimate departure. This is an accurate outlook, but on the wrong subject. It is not nihilism that should be moved along, but life itself. Sort of. However, since life is the only substantial thing that we possess, it is something everybody is quite clingy to and does not like to speed along too much. Fair enough.

This being the case, it would be wise to follow this observation with another one, which can be summed up in a phrase. Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious. Thereby, nothing within life or one’s existence should be taken seriously. You really are insignificant, dispensable, and nobody will remember you witticism one hundred years down the line. To quote Jack Nicholson’s character in about Schmidt:

“Relatively soon, I will die. Maybe in 20 years, maybe tomorrow, it doesn’t matter. Once I am dead and everyone who knew me dies too, it will be as though I never existed. What difference has my life made to anyone. None that I can think of. None at all.”

Take heed and listen. You mean nothing in the ultimate plan, which coincidentally does not exist. Nothing that you think is important, is. Despite life being shit, it doesn’t really matter so get comfortable bathing in your own aura of fuck-it.

This post is partially something I’ve been meaning to write for a while, and partially a response to Ferdinand Bardamu.

FB remarks:

That’s right – there is nothing you can do to stop the goose-stepping of time. Think about it – you are but one ant in the six billion strong colony that is planet Earth. How much can one person affect the teeming horde? Very little. Your vote doesn’t count in any race higher then city dog-catcher. Your street-side protests accomplish nothing. Politicians hire interns to shred the letters you send them. You are a fly on the ass of an ass.

The problem extends further than this. It is true that your vote is insignificant, and it is true that the powerful see your letters of concern as toilet tissue before they see them as constructive humanitarian criticism.

Self-explanatory. As Denis Dutton says,

We can deny it if we want, but we all know that when the chips are down and the anarchists have formed the anarchists’ association, the first thing they do is elect a governing committee.

This brings us back to FB’s problem of the powerful not giving a shit about you or me. The only way they stop caring is when they don’t have the power to not care. But they will always have the power, because we’ll always give it to them. We can’t help it. We’re innately hierarchical.

These three points are constants of human psychology. The only chance we might have of anything ever changing is if we address human psychology itself. This will be difficult if not impossible. Flawed ideologies are not the cause of collapse; humans are the cause of collapse. It just appears that ideologies are at fault because they are how our fucked up psychology manifests itself; but really they’re all diseases contracted from the same dirty whore.

*A few people around here are actually opposed to women’s suffrage; their points are somewhat reasonable, but they can be extended far beyond just women, and reflect problems with the pseudo-democratic system as much as it reflects problems with women. For example the fact that there is so little deliberation in democracy is a systemic flaw, though we might expect to find women are naturally excluded from a more deliberative process; “public reason” might naturally exclude many more women than men.