You’re living in the Stone Age, the world outside your cave is cold, unknowable and dangerous; and you’re suffering from a bout of influenza that, according to the elders of your tribe (their average age is 40), is caused by a human-hating god called Loke, whose name is later, in Viking mythology, changed to Loki; but you’re being looked after by the female members of your tribe, and you know – regardless of how long it takes for you to recover – you’ll be taken care of, because that’s the human way?
Gradually, however, the egalitarian principles of sharing and justice that personified Stone Age societies have, through the fragmentation of tribal groups into faceless, global communities, devolved into one of Dante’s lower level of reality where greed, addiction, and inhumanity have become the virtues of our self-conscious societies; nevertheless, the Stone Age mentality still exists in the subconscious of the collective human animal, but the Jungian archetype of the caring and benevolent homosapien has dissolved into an uncaring, cruel and vicious beast.
In 2002, a book called Straw Dogs by a world-class philosopher called John Gray was released. Described as a ‘’Nihilistic masterpiece’’, it was, is, a text that challenges the concept of humancentrism, which is expounded by idealistic philosophers whom believe humans have a deep connection to their greater reality, for these people reality itself bends to human will, and in the minds of thinkers such as Bishop Berkley (of the 19th Century) objects are actually bought into existence by human observation. John Gray claims these philosophies are an egotistical perception based on a collective belief that humans are separate from animal nature, so … our societies don’t follow the laws of written into the genes of the non- human animals; thus: we are heading towards a Christian Utopia.
The Utopian Concept
The Stone Age society that I’ve just mentioned, with its egalitarian, principled culture, has been used by writers such as Robert Wilkinson (author of the Spirit Level) as an example of our lost utopian ‘’heritage’’; and, due to this book and its subsequent political movement called the Equality Trust, a group of left-wing thinkers have bought their high-I.Q’s into a collective that believes the pluralisation of opportunity and income (which has Marxist overtones) will solve the mental illness, educational failure and crime which is the result of poverty.
I believe, however, these people are missing the point, and are using a theory based on the normal, human tendency to share in social situations to postulate that this can be bought out into wider politics, and cause a paradigm shift where elitism, greed and self-interest are bought out of the darkness and mutated in the light of our ‘’real’’ human nature; and then … utopia will exist?
Perhaps no one elucidated the development of the ‘’us and them’’ phenomena inherent with human nature more than Carl Jung; he claimed there has been, in the human race, an evolutionary adaptation that has caused us to only trust people in the groups we are familiar with. Because, common sense dictates, in our Darwinian past, nature would have selected children who had the tendency to trust their elders’ warnings about the hateful, ‘’animalistic’’ nature of alien people, and those children would’ve been saved from the torture, exploitation, and murder that has run through human history like a river of sanctimonious blood!
You only have to observe the uncontrollable levels of class-, ethnic-, racial- and religious hatred that exists all through our species to understand the truth of Jung’s theory. But the natural hatred and jealousy that results from the hieratical structure of human societies, will cause – due to their feelings of empathy for the so-called weak (chimps feel empathy too) – a minority to fight for a new political system that will, once and for all, create happiness for all! They have forgotten the existential golden rule: everyone like us is we, and everyone who is not is they!
John Gray points out, all through human history, the antecedent for revolution has been bloodshed: from the French revolution to Bolshevism to National Socialism, the language of change is murder!
The Way Forward!
If an individual wants understand the world, and develop a way of living that is inline with his true will, a fundamental understanding of knowledge, and what is- and isn’t true should be where that will is first directed towards.
Empiricalism is dead – an understanding of reality through the senses is subjective at best, and a slave to the paradigms of the day at worst (if, for example, you accept scientific theories as objective truth, because you ‘’experience’’ their data through the senses!).
As a base for human knowledge, Rationalism is a given to any human being with reason because, on a subconscious level, we amalgamate concepts and judge reality from them, but is a fish as a fish as a fish? The Nihilist should accept that reason and rationality are the filters of knowledge, and not pure sense experience, and ‘’all’’ knowledge start from the mind and is projected onto objects, but – due to the fusillade of knowledge that exists – the ideas springing from the subconscious- to the conscious mind should be an accurate representation of what reality the agent wants to create through his own thoughts; and only Pragmatism suffices for that end!
Pragmatism decrees an individual should, given different strands of knowledge, choose the strand of knowledge that is more inline with what the individual wants to achieve; in the words of the science fiction writer Octavia Butler: all, each one of us, can achieve the impossible, if we can convince ourselves that it has been down before.
A Nihilist whom has based his knowledge on what suits his journey towards happiness then should – to find salvation – wage war on human beings with a callous lack of respect; because, in the evolutionary struggle for status that stems from sex selection, the most brutal, uncaring agents finds the most success, and the ‘’good’’ are left to feed off the scraps tossed into the gutters by their brutal masters!
John Gray postulated that morality is a convenience, but I don’t agree with that concept; I do, however, see morality – except for cases where sacrifice is used in the name of ‘’justice’’ – as a tool: F. Nietzsche was perhaps the greatest philosopher to show the different forms of morality for the different degrees of human being; this is where a Nihilist should start, and where he should formulate his plan to defeat and placate his fellow human animals.
Nietzsche’s slave morality was accurate in its explanation of what people in the lowest edge of society - read oppressed or unwanted - see as virtue; Nietzsche said virtues like altruism, liberalization, and fairness are needed by the so-called weak to be seen as ‘’good’’, so the so-called strong will share their knowledge and material- and social wealth; but, Nietzsche said, the ‘’strong’’ see altruism, liberalization and fairness as vice; and view greed, ruthlessness and selfishness as virtue, because it secures their power!
With an understanding of what morality is, a Nihilist should, in an the style of an Existentialist, discover what area of reality best serves his interests and what he’s prepared to work in, and then dedicate his existence to it. Nevertheless, concepts such as philanthropy have an objective reality of ‘’goodness’’ to the emotions; perhaps the reward chemicals are activated in the brain from acts of sharing, because nature selected people who would help each other in times of struggle to aid human survival, but who cares? We are all, in a very strong way, chasing these happy chemicals, and every action is a move towards them, so if an individual finds fulfilment through chasing experiences derived from sharing food rather than a needle; even it’s, on a base level, a junkie’s trip and shouldn’t be called universal morality or any other bunk that is expounded by theologists or religious fanatics, this mode of behaviour could serve a purpose for a Nihilist towards happiness!
The ultimate test of life is, and always will be, to reproduce; but the suffering of existence makes cowards of us all, but treatments such as the Buddhist method (if analyzed) have applications outside of peace and can be used for the trench warfare of human life. A Buddhist master, or anyone who has achieved enlightenment, is a person who has learned to ignore the screams of the ego – all thoughts! – and lives in the level of consciousness that we all enter when we’re in the non-REM level of sleep! Where a concept of self doesn’t exist!
A Nihilist, if he wants peace of mind before his rampage of slaughter, should use the Buddhist method and understand it’s a simple understanding of cause and effect. Non-attachment doesn’t mean weakness; the Samurai, who were a secular and barbaric breed of human beings, used non-attachment to unimportant things (read most human activity) before they cut off their victims’ heads and abused their minds in unmerciful rituals of depravity! The key to a quiet mind is not caring about opinion and it is needed for the next stage of attack!
Charles Manson, perhaps the most underrated and underappreciated radical philosopher of all time, described, while he was interviewed in prison, his theory of mind; he claimed he experienced freedom through the eyes of people as diverse as an Australian bushman through imagining their reality through imagination; and he even got up from his chair and said, with his eyes glazed with excitement, ‘’see … mind is here … mind is here,’’ and so on; he did this because he wanted to show how it’s the mind that experiences everything, and – in effect – the body is just a vehicle for all sources of pleasure and pain.
From the establishment of freedom being a concept of imagination: in that it – freedom – doesn’t require an apparition of luxury, competence, or superiority for a Nihilist to feel those circumstantial rewards, the imagination can also serve to create circumstance, but a Nietzschian element of superiority over the remaining selves - in the Buddhist sense of their being no ‘’I’’ - over the myriad of other selves must be achieved before the individual revolution takes place.
This dominance of, say, a sportsman self over or an academic self must be stoked with the emotion of desire, which is the fuel that each self needs win the inner- and outer wars, and is – in essence – inseparable from will in that it has a feeling of dominance over the selves just like the emotion of will has too. Once the dominant selves are established in a Nihilist, like all animals, he must, when it comes to status competition, pick off the weaker members of the pack without mercy, and see emotions like contentment or belonging as his enemy: you don’t want to need them. The states needed are the states that are – again, in the existential sense – the effects of individual command of a self which has reached its fullest potential, and has defeated one of our biggest evolutionary enemies: the tendency to believe and live by the paradigms of our cultures. We must be individuals, which is the only value of Nihilism!
